AI Engineer - Prototyping New Irvine, CA

Emergence; Irvine (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

401(k) with company match

Flexible PTO

Hybrid/remote-friendly

Opportunities at the frontier of AI

Job summary

Emergence AI invites an AI Engineer to shape the Enterprise Agent Platform. You will build customer-facing capabilities and AI-powered workflows that help customers deploy trustworthy AI in production, collaborating closely with Product Management, Customer Success, and enterprise clients.

You will be AI-native, value engineering judgment and ownership, and work across backend services, APIs, and developer experiences to accelerate delivery while ensuring reliability and security.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• AI-native engineer using Claude Code, Cursor, Codex as part of daily workflow.
• Strong fundamentals with production backend services, APIs, distributed systems, cloud apps or developer platforms.
• Comfortable across frontend, backend, infrastructure, or cloud services and quick to learn new languages/frameworks.
• Excellent communication and collaboration with customers, product managers, and engineers.

Responsibilities

• Build customer-facing capabilities across the Enterprise Agent Platform.
• Develop production-ready AI workflows and reusable platform services.
• Design trusted AI capabilities: evaluation, verification, observability, provenance, human-in-the-loop workflows.
• Create intuitive developer and user experiences for configuring and operating AI agents.
• Collaborate with enterprise customers to translate problems into software and prototype solutions.
• Own features from concept through production and ensure scalable architecture.

Skills

Backend engineering

APIs

Distributed systems

Cloud platforms

Communication

Ownership

Tools

Claude Code

Cursor

Codex

Job description

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

As an AI Engineer at Emergence AI you'll build customer‑facing platform capabilities and AI‑powered solutions that solve real business problems. You'll work directly with Product Management, Customer Success, and enterprise customers to rapidly understand problems, ship production‑quality software, and evolve customer‑specific solutions into reusable platform capabilities.

We're looking for engineers who are AI‑native, curious, and passionate about building. AI isn't a novelty, it's how you build. You use AI to accelerate implementation while remaining accountable for architecture, engineering quality, and customer outcomes. We care far more about engineering judgment, ownership, and the ability to learn than expertise in any specific programming language or framework.

You’ll

Bring software engineering excellence, product thinking, and an AI‑native builder mindset to solve challenging problems at the intersection of enterprise software and AI, including:

• Building customer‑facing capabilities across our Enterprise Agent Platform, including agent orchestration, workflow execution, enterprise integrations, knowledge management, and administration.
• Developing production‑ready AI workflows and reusable platform services that power enterprise solutions across multiple industries.
• Designing trusted AI capabilities including evaluation, verification, observability, provenance, and human‑in‑the‑loop workflows that enable customers to confidently deploy AI in production.
• Building intuitive developer and user experiences that simplify how enterprise customers create, configure, and operate AI agents.
• Working directly with enterprise customers to understand their business problems, rapidly prototype solutions, and turn successful implementations into reusable platform capabilities.
• Build the core platform that enables customers to create, configure, deploy, and operate AI agents securely at enterprise scale. Develop capabilities including agent orchestration, workflow execution, context management, memory, governance, authentication, and enterprise integrations.

Industry AI Solutions

• Partner with customers in semiconductor manufacturing, life sciences, and other industries to build production‑ready AI workflows that automate complex business processes. Transform customer‑specific solutions into reusable platform capabilities that benefit every customer.
• Design and implement the systems that make enterprise AI trustworthy, including evaluation frameworks, verification pipelines, policy enforcement, audit trails, observability, provenance, and human‑in‑the‑loop workflows.

Data & Knowledge Platform

• Build the capabilities that connect to enterprise data sources, discover schemas and semantic relationships, manage enterprise knowledge, and provide AI agents with the context needed to reason accurately over complex business data.

Agent Runtime & Workflow Engine

• 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.

Build Enterprise AI Products

• Design, build, and ship customer‑facing capabilities across the Enterprise Agent Platform.
• Own features from concept through production, balancing customer needs with long‑term platform architecture.
• Build high‑quality software across the full stack, leveraging AI development tools to dramatically accelerate delivery while maintaining engineering excellence.
• Make thoughtful engineering decisions around APIs, architecture, scalability, security, performance, and maintainability.

Partner with Customers

• Work directly with Product Management, Customer Success, and enterprise customers to understand business problems and translate them into software.
• Participate in customer workshops, technical discussions, solution design, and production deployments.
• Rapidly iterate on customer feedback and evolve successful implementations into reusable platform capabilities.
• Balance speed of delivery with building a platform that scales across customers and industries.

Build Trusted AI Systems

• Design production‑grade AI workflows with robust error handling, retry mechanisms, observability, auditability, and human‑in‑the‑loop execution.
• Build systems that are measurable, testable, debuggable, and reliable in production.
• Continuously improve platform quality through evaluation, monitoring, automation, and customer feedback.

Raise the Engineering Bar

• Establish engineering best practices, reusable patterns, testing standards, and high‑quality software engineering practices.
• Continuously evaluate emerging AI technologies and adopt those that meaningfully improve engineering productivity and customer value.
• Challenge assumptions, simplify complexity, and continuously improve how software is designed and built.

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. AI is how you build not simply a tool you occasionally use.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals with experience building production backend services, APIs, distributed systems, cloud applications, or developer platforms.
• Comfortable working across the stack, whether frontend, backend, infrastructure, or cloud services. You learn new languages and frameworks quickly and choose the right technology for the problem.
• Experience building and shipping software used by real customers in production environments.
• Strong problem‑solving skills, sound engineering judgment, and the ability to navigate ambiguity.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively 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 designing workflow engines, orchestration platforms, or distributed systems.
• Experience integrating enterprise data sources such as databases, data warehouses, SaaS applications, APIs, or document repositories.
• Experience building developer tools, internal platforms, or engineering productivity systems.
• 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 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: $180K - $250K

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.