Staff Software Engineer, Applied AI
emergence-capital-partners · San Francisco ·
- Seniority
- Staff
- Category
- AI engineering
- Experience
- 1+ years
emergence-capital-partners · San Francisco ·
We're building AI products that solve real problems for real customers. This role sits at the intersection of product and engineering– you'll own features end-to-end, from understanding user problems to shipping production code that scales.
Applied AI product engineering is a new discipline. You won't just be integrating APIs – you'll be designing AI systems that work reliably in production, building evaluation frameworks to measure quality, and iterating rapidly based on real user feedback. You'll work directly with customers to understand their workflows and translate that understanding into product decisions.
This is not a research role. We're looking for engineers who ship. You'll be measured by the products you deliver and the problems you solve, not by papers published or models trained. The best candidates combine deep technical skills with strong product intuition and a relentless focus on user outcomes.
Design, build, and ship AI-powered product features from concept through production deployment
Develop and maintain LLM-based systems including RAG pipelines, agents, and workflow automation
Build evaluation frameworks and monitoring systems to ensure AI quality and reliability
Work directly with customers to understand problems, gather feedback, and validate solutions
Collaborate with product and design to define roadmap and prioritize features based on impact
Optimize system performance, cost, and latency as usage scales
Contribute to technical architecture decisions and establish engineering best practices
4+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 1-2 years building AI/ML-powered products
Strong proficiency in Python; experience with TypeScript/JavaScript for full-stack development
Hands-on experience with LLMs in production: prompt engineering, RAG systems, fine-tuning, or agent frameworks
Solid understanding of ML fundamentals: embeddings, vector databases, evaluation metrics, and model selection
Experience building and maintaining production systems with high reliability requirements
Strong product intuition, ability to translate ambiguous user needs into concrete technical solutions
Excellent communication skills and comfort working directly with customers and stakeholders
BS/MS in Computer Science, or equivalent practical experience
Experience with AI infrastructure: LangChain, LlamaIndex, vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, Chroma)
Background in NLP, information retrieval, or search systems
Previous startup experience, especially as an early engineer or technical co-founder
Domain expertise in financial services, legal, healthcare, or other enterprise SaaS verticals
Contributions to open-source AI/ML projects
Experience building developer tools or platforms