Staff Engineer

Emergent builds autonomous coding agents that replace traditional software development by generating, testing, and deploying production applications directly from plain-language intent. Our systems run in production at global scale and are used to build millions of real applications.

Since our public launch, we've crossed $100M in ARR and grown to over 10M users across 190+ countries. We're backed by Khosla Ventures, SoftBank, Google, Lightspeed, Prosus, Together, and Y Combinator.

We're solving the hard part of AI-driven software creation: correctness, reliability, security, and scale in real production systems. The team is built by repeat founders, Olympiad medalists, IIT & IIM alumni, and leaders from Google, Amazon, and Dropbox.

We're hiring builders who want ownership, speed, and impact at global scale.

The Role:
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.

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, and verification and correctness. The systems you build will influence how millions of applications are created.

We're now tackling the hardest problems in AI-powered software creation: how autonomous agents reliably build production systems, how we verify correctness when outputs are non-deterministic, how we build trust, safety, observability, and fault tolerance into systems that reason, and how 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.

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 and 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

Benefits and Perks:

Daily Meals: Lunch and Dinner provided
Family Insurance: 3 Lakhs worth of coverage for you and your family
Unlimited Paid Time Off: Take the time you need to recharge and come back refreshed
Flexible Working Hours: Work arrangements that fit your life and commitments

Let's build the future of software together.