AI Engineer

Emergence AI; Irvine (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Emergence AI in Irvine, CA is seeking an AI Engineer to build customer-facing capabilities across the Enterprise Agent Platform, partnering with Product Management, Customer Success, and enterprise customers to turn complex business problems into production-grade AI solutions.

You will own architecture, ensure reliability, and apply AI development tools to accelerate delivery, while maintaining ownership and strong engineering judgment in a fast-growing startup.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• AI-native engineer who uses Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or similar tools daily.
• Strong backend, APIs, distributed systems, and cloud apps experience.
• Experience shipping software used by real customers in production.
• Excellent communication with customers, PMs, designers, and engineers.
• Self-driven with ownership in a fast-moving startup.

Responsibilities

• Build the Enterprise Agent Platform for secure, scalable AI agents.
• Collaborate with customers and cross-functional teams to turn problems into production-grade workflows.
• Design systems for trustworthiness, evaluation, and governance of AI solutions.
• Connect to enterprise data sources and enable context for AI reasoning.
• Develop runtime for long-running AI workflows with reliability and observability.
• Own features from concept to production, emphasizing APIs, security, and performance.
• Set reusable engineering patterns and adopt tools to improve productivity.

Skills

Strong software engineering

Excellent communication

Ownership mindset

Learning agility

AI-native engineering

Tools

Claude Code

Cursor

Codex

LLMs

Kubernetes

AWS/Azure/GCP

Job description

About Emergence AI

Emergence AI is building AI agents that don't just generate answers—they investigate, reason, and help organizations make better decisions.

Our platform enables enterprises to deploy intelligent agents that understand complex data, collaborate across business systems, and automate high-value work with the transparency, traceability, and reliability required for production environments.

Most AI generates answers. We're solving the harder problem: building AI systems organizations can trust with real work. That means developing agents that can evaluate evidence, explain their reasoning, learn from feedback, and operate reliably when the stakes are high.

Founded by veterans of IBM Research, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, we're a small team of researchers, engineers, and builders working at the intersection of frontier AI research and real-world customer challenges. Everyone owns meaningful work, collaborates directly with customers, and helps shape the future of our platform.

About The Role

As an AI Engineer, you'll build customer-facing capabilities across Emergence's Enterprise Agent Platform, working directly with Product Management, Customer Success, and enterprise customers to turn complex business problems into production-grade AI systems. You'll operate as an AI-native engineer, using AI development tools to accelerate delivery while owning architecture, engineering quality, and customer outcomes. We care more about engineering judgment, ownership, and the ability to learn than expertise in any specific language or framework.

You'll

• Build the core Enterprise Agent Platform that lets customers create, configure, deploy, and operate AI agents securely at scale, including agent orchestration, workflow execution, context management, memory, governance, and enterprise integrations.
• Partner with customers in semiconductor manufacturing, life sciences, and other data-intensive industries to build production-ready AI workflows, then turn those customer-specific solutions into reusable platform capabilities that benefit every customer.
• Design the systems that make enterprise AI trustworthy, including evaluation frameworks, verification pipelines, policy enforcement, audit trails, observability, provenance, and human-in-the-loop workflows.
• Build the data and knowledge capabilities that connect to enterprise data sources, discover schemas and semantic relationships, and give AI agents the context needed to reason accurately over complex business data.
• Develop the runtime that powers long-running AI workflows, managing execution state, retries, approvals, checkpoints, memory, and multi-agent coordination while ensuring reliability and transparency.
• Work directly with Product Management, Customer Success, and enterprise customers in workshops, technical discussions, and production deployments to rapidly understand problems and ship solutions.
• Own features from concept through production, making thoughtful engineering decisions around APIs, architecture, scalability, security, and performance.
• Raise the engineering bar by establishing reusable patterns and best practices, evaluating emerging AI tools for what meaningfully improves engineering productivity, and continuously simplifying how we build.

You'll Have

• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience building production software.
• AI-native engineer who uses Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or similar AI development tools as part of your daily engineering workflow, not just a tool you occasionally reach for.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals - production backend services, APIs, distributed systems, cloud applications, or developer platforms - and comfortable working across the stack, picking up new languages and frameworks quickly.
• Experience building and shipping software used by real customers in production environments.
• Strong problem-solving skills, sound engineering judgment, and excellent communication with customers, product managers, designers, and engineers.
• Self-driven, curious, and comfortable taking ownership in a fast-moving startup environment.

Bonus Points

• Experience building AI agents, agentic workflows, or enterprise AI applications.
• Experience with LLMs, tool calling, RAG, context engineering, memory systems, or multi-agent orchestration.
• Experience integrating enterprise data sources such as databases, data warehouses, SaaS applications, APIs, or document repositories.
• Familiarity with Rust, Go, TypeScript, Python, or other modern programming languages.
• Experience with cloud-native platforms, Kubernetes, observability, distributed tracing, or production operations.
• Demonstrated curiosity, rapid learning, and a passion for solving difficult engineering problems.

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.