Staff Engineer

<p>Software engineering is about to change more in the next five years than it has in the last fifty.</p> <p>At Emergent, we're building autonomous coding agents that can generate, test, debug, and deploy production applications directly from plain-language intent.</p> <p>Not copilots.</p> <p>Not code-completion tools.</p> <p>Complete software systems.</p> <p>Since launching publicly, Emergent has grown to:</p> <ul> <li>$100M ARR in under 8 months</li> <li>11 Million+ users across 190+ countries</li> <li>12 Million+ applications built on the platform</li> <li>$100M+ raised from Khosla Ventures, SoftBank, Google, Lightspeed, Prosus, Together, and Y Combinator</li> </ul> <p>We're now tackling the hardest problems in AI-powered software creation:</p> <ul> <li>How do autonomous agents reliably build production systems?</li> <li>How do we verify correctness when outputs are non-deterministic?</li> <li>How do we build trust, safety, observability, and fault tolerance into systems that reason?</li> <li>How do we orchestrate thousands of AI-driven decisions across distributed infrastructure in real time?</li> </ul> <p>These aren't solved problems.</p> <p>There are no playbooks.</p> <p>That's why we're hiring.</p> <h2><strong>The Opportunity</strong></h2> <p>This is not a traditional Staff Engineer role.</p> <p>You won't be optimizing APIs, managing microservices, or incrementally improving existing infrastructure.</p> <p>You will help define the architecture of systems that can eventually replace large portions of the software development lifecycle itself.</p> <p>You'll work on problems at the intersection of:</p> <ul> <li>Distributed systems</li> <li>Autonomous agents</li> <li>Reliability engineering</li> <li>Program synthesis</li> <li>Large-scale infrastructure</li> <li>Runtime execution environments</li> <li>Verification and correctness</li> </ul> <p>The systems you build will influence how millions of applications are created.</p> <h2><strong>What You'll Own</strong></h2> <h3><strong>Architect Agent Infrastructure</strong></h3> <p>Design the systems that allow autonomous agents to plan, reason, execute, recover from failures, and continuously improve.</p> <h3><strong>Build for Planetary Scale</strong></h3> <p>Develop backend and infrastructure systems supporting millions of applications, billions of agent actions, and globally distributed workloads.</p> <h3><strong>Solve Reliability for Non-Deterministic Systems</strong></h3> <p>Create new approaches for validation, observability, debugging, evaluation, and fault tolerance where traditional software engineering assumptions no longer apply.</p> <h3><strong>Drive Technical Direction</strong></h3> <p>Set architectural standards across infrastructure, platform, agent runtime, and distributed execution systems.</p> <h3><strong>Create New Engineering Paradigms</strong></h3> <p>Many of the challenges you'll face don't have established solutions.</p> <p>You'll be expected to invent them.</p> <h3><strong>Raise the Bar</strong></h3> <p>Influence engineering culture, mentor senior engineers, and help build one of the highest-talent-density engineering organizations in the industry.</p> <h2><strong>What We're Looking For</strong></h2> <p>We're less interested in specific technologies and more interested in how you've thought about hard systems problems.</p> <p>You likely have:</p> <ul> <li>9+ years building large-scale distributed systems</li> <li>Experience owning architecture for critical production infrastructure</li> <li>Deep expertise in concurrency, distributed computing, reliability, performance, and fault tolerance</li> <li>A history of driving technical strategy across multiple teams</li> <li>Strong backend expertise in Go, Python, Java, C++, Rust, or similar languages</li> </ul> <p>You may have worked at companies like Google, Uber, Meta, Databricks, Snowflake, Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, Amazon, Microsoft, or exceptional high-growth startups.</p> <p>Experience with AI systems is helpful but not required.</p> <p>Exceptional systems engineers learn fast.</p> <h2><strong>Who Thrives Here</strong></h2> <ul> <li>Engineers who prefer first-principles thinking over established playbooks</li> <li>Builders who want ownership rather than coordination</li> <li>People who enjoy solving ambiguous, unsolved technical problems</li> <li>Engineers who optimize for impact, not titles</li> <li>Individuals who want to help define an entirely new category of software</li> </ul> <h2><strong>Why This Role Exists</strong></h2> <p>The software industry spent decades building tools that help engineers write code.</p> <p>We're building systems that write software.</p> <p>If successful, this will be one of the most important platform shifts in computing.</p> <p>You'll help build the foundation.</p> <h2><strong>Compensation</strong></h2> <ul> <li>Top-of-market salary</li> <li>Employee stock options&nbsp;</li> <li>Direct influence on company and technical direction</li> <li>Opportunity to work alongside repeat founders, Olympiad medalists, and engineers from Google, Amazon, Dropbox, and leading AI companies</li> </ul> <p>The best time to join a category-defining company is before the category is defined.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p>