Emergence Capital Partners Logo

Emergence Capital Partners

Staff Software Engineer, Applied AI

Reposted 2 Months Ago
In-Office
San Francisco, CA
Mid level
In-Office
San Francisco, CA
Mid level
Design and build AI-powered product features, develop LLM-based systems, ensure quality, collaborate on product decisions, and optimize performance.
The summary above was generated by AI
About the Role

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.

What You'll Do
  • 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

Qualifications
  • 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

Nice to Have
  • 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

Similar Jobs

17 Days Ago
In-Office
200K-275K Annually
Expert/Leader
200K-275K Annually
Expert/Leader
Big Data • Information Technology • Software • Analytics
Build and ship generative AI-powered software features for a large-scale public safety platform. Responsibilities include owning major application components, scaling terabytes of ingested data, enabling real-time querying and notifications, optimizing search, and training, deploying, integrating, and monitoring machine learning models. The role requires collaboration with product, engineering, deployment teams, and users, with a focus on responsible AI, reliable software, and production-grade development.
Top Skills: AirflowAmazon BedrockAmazon SagemakerAWSCeleryDjangoElasticsearchGenerative AiKafkaKubernetesLarge Language ModelsMachine LearningMapboxPostgresPulumiPythonReactReduxTerraform
20 Days Ago
In-Office
405K-485K Annually
Senior level
405K-485K Annually
Senior level
Artificial Intelligence • Natural Language Processing • Generative AI
Build AI agent harnesses, research workflows, evaluations, and integrations that enable Claude to conduct science and engineering research. Connect simulation tools, define verifiable tasks, prototype with expert partners, deploy pilots, and convert successful engagements into reusable systems. Collaborate with research and product teams while communicating model capabilities, limitations, and tradeoffs to technical and nontechnical stakeholders.
Top Skills: Ai AgentsComputational Fluid DynamicsData PipelinesElectromagnetic ModelingEvaluation SystemsFinite Element AnalysisLarge Language ModelsMachine LearningMolecular ModelingNumerical MethodsOptimizationReinforcement LearningScientific ComputingTool Use
2 Months Ago
In-Office or Remote
Senior level
Senior level
Artificial Intelligence • HR Tech • Machine Learning • Natural Language Processing • Software • Conversational AI • Generative AI
Design, build, and productionize LLM-based conversational and AI systems for enterprise coaching. Integrate structured and unstructured data, prototype end-to-end services, improve model behavior and observability, and collaborate with product and engineering to deploy scalable, reliable AI-driven coaching workflows.
Top Skills: AWSAzureBi ToolsCloud Ml ServicesDockerGCPKubernetesLarge Language Models (Llms)MatplotlibMlflowNlpNumpyPandasPlotlyPysparkScikit-LearnSeabornSQLWeights & Biases

What you need to know about the Los Angeles Tech Scene

Los Angeles is a global leader in entertainment, so it’s no surprise that many of the biggest players in streaming, digital media and game development call the city home. But the city boasts plenty of non-entertainment innovation as well, with tech companies spanning verticals like AI, fintech, e-commerce and biotech. With major universities like Caltech, UCLA, USC and the nearby UC Irvine, the city has a steady supply of top-flight tech and engineering talent — not counting the graduates flocking to Los Angeles from across the world to enjoy its beaches, culture and year-round temperate climate.

Key Facts About Los Angeles Tech

  • Number of Tech Workers: 375,800; 5.5% of overall workforce (2024 CompTIA survey)
  • Major Tech Employers: Snap, Netflix, SpaceX, Disney, Google
  • Key Industries: Artificial intelligence, adtech, media, software, game development
  • Funding Landscape: $11.6 billion in venture capital funding in 2024 (Pitchbook)
  • Notable Investors: Strong Ventures, Fifth Wall, Upfront Ventures, Mucker Capital, Kittyhawk Ventures
  • Research Centers and Universities: California Institute of Technology, UCLA, University of Southern California, UC Irvine, Pepperdine, California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy, Center for Quantum Science and Engineering

Sign up now Access later

Create Free Account

Please log in or sign up to report this job.

Create Free Account