Staff Engineer

About the role

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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Requirements

• 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.

Benefits

Additional Information

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.

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