Staff Engineer

Software engineering is about to change more in the next five years than it has in the last fifty.

At Emergent, we're building autonomous coding agents that can generate, test, debug, and deploy production applications directly from plain-language intent.

Not copilots.

Not code-completion tools.

Complete software systems.

Since launching publicly, Emergent has grown to:

• $100M ARR in under 8 months
• 11 Million+ users across 190+ countries
• 12 Million+ applications built on the platform
• $100M+ raised from Khosla Ventures, SoftBank, Google, Lightspeed, Prosus, Together, and Y Combinator

We're now tackling the hardest problems in AI-powered software creation:

• How do autonomous agents reliably build production systems?
• How do we verify correctness when outputs are non-deterministic?
• How do we build trust, safety, observability, and fault tolerance into systems that reason?
• How do we orchestrate thousands of AI-driven decisions across distributed infrastructure in real time?

These aren't solved problems.

There are no playbooks.

That's why we're hiring.

The Opportunity

This is not a traditional Staff Engineer role.

You won't be optimizing APIs, managing microservices, or incrementally improving existing infrastructure.

You will help define the architecture of systems that can eventually replace large portions of the software development lifecycle itself.

You'll work on problems at the intersection of:

• Distributed systems
• Autonomous agents
• Reliability engineering
• Program synthesis
• Large-scale infrastructure
• Runtime execution environments
• Verification and correctness

The systems you build will influence how millions of applications are created.

What You'll Own

Architect Agent Infrastructure

Design the systems that allow autonomous agents to plan, reason, execute, recover from failures, and continuously improve.

Build for Planetary Scale

Develop backend and infrastructure systems supporting millions of applications, billions of agent actions, and globally distributed workloads.

Solve Reliability for Non-Deterministic Systems

Create new approaches for validation, observability, debugging, evaluation, and fault tolerance where traditional software engineering assumptions no longer apply.

Drive Technical Direction

Set architectural standards across infrastructure, platform, agent runtime, and distributed execution systems.

Create New Engineering Paradigms

Many of the challenges you'll face don't have established solutions.

You'll be expected to invent them.

Raise the Bar

Influence engineering culture, mentor senior engineers, and help build one of the highest-talent-density engineering organizations in the industry.

What We're Looking For

We're less interested in specific technologies and more interested in how you've thought about hard systems problems.

You likely have:

• 9+ years building large-scale distributed systems
• Experience owning architecture for critical production infrastructure
• Deep expertise in concurrency, distributed computing, reliability, performance, and fault tolerance
• A history of driving technical strategy across multiple teams
• Strong backend expertise in Go, Python, Java, C++, Rust, or similar languages

You may have worked at companies like Google, Uber, Meta, Databricks, Snowflake, Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, Amazon, Microsoft, or exceptional high-growth startups.

Experience with AI systems is helpful but not required.

Exceptional systems engineers learn fast.

Who Thrives Here

• Engineers who prefer first-principles thinking over established playbooks
• Builders who want ownership rather than coordination
• People who enjoy solving ambiguous, unsolved technical problems
• Engineers who optimize for impact, not titles
• Individuals who want to help define an entirely new category of software

Why This Role Exists

The software industry spent decades building tools that help engineers write code.

We're building systems that write software.

If successful, this will be one of the most important platform shifts in computing.

You'll help build the foundation.

Compensation

• Top-of-market salary
• Employee stock options 
• Direct influence on company and technical direction
• Opportunity to work alongside repeat founders, Olympiad medalists, and engineers from Google, Amazon, Dropbox, and leading AI companies

The best time to join a category-defining company is before the category is defined.