Staff Engineer - Backend

Software engineering is about to change more in the next five years than it has in the last fifty. At Emergent, we're building autonomous coding agents that can generate, test, debug, and deploy production applications directly from plain-language intent. Not copilots. Not code-completion tools. Complete software systems.

This is not a traditional staff engineer role. You won't be optimising APIs, managing microservices, or incrementally improving existing infrastructure. You will help define the architecture of systems that can eventually replace large portions of the software development lifecycle itself. You'll work on problems at the intersection of distributed systems, autonomous agents, reliability engineering, program synthesis, large-scale infrastructure, runtime execution environments, and verification and correctness. The systems you build will influence how millions of applications are created.

Responsibilities:

• Architect agent infrastructure: design the systems that allow autonomous agents to plan, reason, execute, recover from failures, and continuously improve.
• Build for planetary scale: develop backend and infrastructure systems supporting millions of applications, billions of agent actions, and globally distributed workloads.
• Solve reliability for non-deterministic systems: create new approaches for validation, observability, debugging, evaluation, and fault tolerance where traditional software engineering assumptions no longer apply.
• Drive technical direction: set architectural standards across infrastructure, platform, agent runtime, and distributed execution systems.
• Create new engineering paradigms: many of the challenges you'll face don't have established solutions, and you'll be expected to invent them.
• Raise the bar: influence engineering culture, mentor senior engineers, and help build one of the highest-talent-density engineering organisations in the industry.

Requirements:

• We're less interested in specific technologies and more interested in how you've thought about hard systems problems.
• 9+ years building large-scale distributed systems.
• Experience owning architecture for critical production infrastructure.
• Deep expertise in concurrency, distributed computing, reliability, performance, and fault tolerance.
• A history of driving technical strategy across multiple teams.
• Strong backend expertise in Go, Python, Java, C++, Rust, or similar languages.
• You may have worked at companies like Google, Uber, Meta, Databricks, Snowflake, Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, Amazon, Microsoft, or exceptional high-growth startups.
• Experience with AI systems is helpful but not required; exceptional systems engineers learn fast.