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Staff Software Engineer - Applied AI

Emergence Capital Partners · San Francisco · United States

Contract
Full time
Occupation
Software Engineer

Posted: 12/22/2025 · Last checked: 11/10/2026

Job description

Quoted in full from Emergence Capital Partners's job posting. Gavroche does not edit it.

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

From Gavroche data

Figures computed from live adverts on Gavroche; the job text above is the employer's.

Similar roles in San Francisco

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What software engineer adverts in San Francisco state

Middle half: 187,500 – 242,054 USD a year; median 212,500 USD.

From 234 adverts by 51 employers that state a salary, annualised.

How software engineer roles in the United States are worked

2% fully remote · 2% hybrid · 96% do not say

Of 773 adverts. An advert that does not state a work mode is counted as not saying, not as on-site.

New openings in San Francisco, by week

  1. 8/17/2026 238
  2. 8/24/2026 272
  3. 8/31/2026 346
  4. 9/7/2026 302
  5. 9/14/2026 373
  6. 9/21/2026 438
  7. 9/28/2026 527
  8. 10/5/2026 495
  9. 10/12/2026 595
  10. 10/19/2026 454
  11. 10/26/2026 485
  12. 11/2/2026 479
  13. 11/9/2026 108

5,112 openings over 12 weeks, by the week they were published.

Other roles at Emergence Capital Partners

5 open.