VP, Engineering

About Emergence AI

Emergence AI is a frontier agentic AI lab advancing safe, autonomous AI through its pioneering neuroformal architecture. We are building the next generation of enterprise AI: systems capable of understanding complex knowledge, reasoning across information, executing multi-step workflows, and taking action with the verifiability and reliability required for mission-critical environments.

Our Enterprise Agent Platform provides the foundation for building, deploying, and operating AI systems in production — from data connectivity and knowledge management to workflow orchestration, observability, evaluation, and governance. We partner with organizations in semiconductor manufacturing, life sciences, and other data-intensive industries to solve complex challenges that require trusted AI systems capable of operating in real-world environments.

Our team brings experience from leading AI research labs and technology companies, including IBM Research, The Allen Institute for AI, Amazon, and Broadcom. With headquarters in New York and offices across California, Spain, and India, we bring together diverse expertise and perspectives to tackle some of the most challenging problems in enterprise AI.

About the Role

Every few decades, the way software gets built changes completely. This is one of those moments, and we want you to lead it here.

At Emergence AI, agents already write most of our code. That has moved the hard part of engineering: deciding what's worth building, making intent precise enough for agents to execute, and proving the result is right without a person reading every line. Most companies are bolting agents onto processes designed for a world where people typed every line. We're redesigning how we build from first principles, and we want a leader who will make us one of the fastest engineering teams anywhere, without ever trading away trust.

Trust is the point. Our customers run AI in semiconductor fabs, labs, and other environments where mistakes are expensive, and our neuroformal approach exists so they can rely on what agents do. You'll hold how we build our own product to that same standard: move at the speed agents make possible, and prove it's right.

As VP, Engineering, you'll own delivery of our product end to end, lead and develop the people who build it, and shape the way we work. You won't inherit a playbook. You'll write it, build with agents yourself, and show the team what's possible. If you've been looking for the place where you can run engineering the way you know it should run now, this is it.

You'll

• Ship, fast and continuously. Make daily delivery normal: working software reaching customers in small, verified increments, measured by what changes for them rather than by plans or activity.
• Lead and develop people. Manage and grow a team of engineers. Set clear expectations, give candid feedback often, recognize great work, and hold a high bar for performance, acting quickly when it slips. Give every engineer a clear path to grow through stretch work, ownership of meaningful outcomes, pairing, and regular career conversations grounded in what they've shipped. Define what growth means when agents do the typing: product sense, judgment, and leverage.
• Raise talent density. Hire exceptional, AI-native engineers and develop them fast. Help everyone on the team become dramatically more effective with agents and more product-minded, spread what works in the open, and celebrate outcomes over activity.
• Write the playbook. Turn our engineering principles into how we work every day, keep evolving them as the tools change, and retire anything that no longer earns its place.
• Turn strategy into something agents can execute. Translate our leadership charter and product direction into clear customer outcomes and success criteria that people and agents can act on and check automatically.
• Tear out what slows us down. Find every place work waits (hand-offs, approvals, meetings, slow checks) and remove it. Replace process with automation wherever the risk allows.
• Lead by showing. Make working software the way we communicate. Ideas get prototyped before they're specified, features go through many fast iterations before they ship, and debates end with a demo.
• Put human judgment where it counts. People decide intent, design, and risk; automated checks and agent reviewers verify the code. Steadily expand what ships on its own as our guardrails earn that trust, and keep people firmly in charge of anything hard to reverse or sensitive.
• Make agent quality provable. As more of our product becomes tools and knowledge that agents use, build the evals and verification that prove our agents get known use cases right, and keep them right as everything around them changes.
• Make time zones a strength. Coordinate a team spread across New York, California, Spain, and India so work keeps moving around the clock, with clear written hand-offs, decisions made in the open, and enough overlap for people to build real working relationships.

You'll Have

• You build with agents every day, hands-on, and have a sharp point of view on how review, testing, and quality must change when agents write the code.
• You've led engineering for a product customers depend on, and you were accountable for shipping it, not just for the team that built it.
• You've changed how a team works, from long plans and big releases to continuous, incremental delivery, and brought people with you. You can point to a real step change in speed, with quality holding up or improving.
• You turn strategy into measurable outcomes and an execution plan a team can actually deliver against.
• Strong technical judgment. You're credible in any design review, quick to spot what won't survive production, and clear about which decisions are hard to undo.
• Several years of managing engineers directly, with a record of building high-performing teams: hiring well, giving candid feedback, handling underperformance decisively, and growing people into larger roles. The people you've managed would work for you again.
• You've built career paths that engineers found genuinely useful, and you have a view on how growth and leveling must change when agents write the code.
• You communicate clearly and briefly, and you know when a demo beats a document.
• You move fast, act without waiting for permission, thrive in ambiguity, and learn as quickly as the tools change.
• You've led teams across countries and time zones and made distance an advantage, through strong written communication, clean hand-offs, and work that keeps moving while others sleep.
• Most people in this role will have 15+ years of engineering experience, including several years leading teams. What matters most is what you've built and how fast you learn.

Bonus Points

• You've built or led engineering for agent products, and know what it takes to make non-deterministic systems dependable.
• You've designed evals or automated verification for agent behavior and caught regressions before customers did.
• You've built internal agent tooling or an automated delivery pipeline that took on work people used to do by hand.
• Experience with formal or rigorous specification and verification methods.
• You've been a founder or an early engineering leader at a startup that shipped real product under real constraints.

 

Emergence AI offers competitive compensation.
Comprehensive health benefits including medical, dental and vision.
401(k) with company match.
Flexible PTO and company holidays.
Flexible hybrid/remote work environment.
The opportunity to work at the forefront of technological advancement.

Compensation Range: $250K - $350K

Emergence AI is an equal opportunity employer committed to building an inclusive workplace where people with diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives can do their best work. We believe building trustworthy AI requires diverse ways of thinking, and we're committed to creating an environment where everyone can thrive.

If you're excited about this opportunity but don't meet every qualification, we encourage you to apply. We value curiosity, ownership, and the ability to learn just as much as matching every item on a job description.