Staff AI Agent Engineer at Emergence AI – Irvine, California

Emergence AI is building next-generation agentic AI systems that move beyond code generation to provable task completion, verification, and long-horizon autonomy. Our Platform focuses on automating complex, mission-critical data workflows, from ingestion and transformation through analysis, decisioning, and action.

We work with customers in semiconductors, life sciences, and other data-intensive industries to turn fragmented, high-stakes data into trustworthy, continuously-operating AI Agents.

We're seeking a Staff/Principal Agentic AI Engineer to define and own the production architecture for our autonomous agent platform. You'll build reliable, safe, and scalable systems that power complex agentic workflows, combining deep AI/ML expertise with systems engineering to create production-grade enterprise agents.

Build Production AI Agent Systems

• Design and deploy end-to-end autonomous AI systems including agent runtimes, memory systems, orchestration, tool integration, and evaluation pipelines
• Implement multi-agent orchestration patterns using frameworks like LangGraph, AutoGen, or custom solutions
• Build agent coordination patterns for multi-step workflows with self-learning and continuous improvement

Agent Governance & Safety

• Embed security, guardrails, sandbox isolation, auditability, and policy enforcement into agent runtimes
• Build HITL (Human-in-the-Loop) frameworks with approval workflows and escalation policies
• Architect audit trails, decision reasoning logs, compliance tracking, and replay capabilities

Observability & Evaluation

• Implement distributed tracing across agent workflows, tool invocations, and LLM calls
• Build monitoring dashboards for agent performance, decision quality, and anomaly detection
• Design evaluation frameworks and metrics for reliability, latency, cost, and quality assessment

Prompt Engineering & Context Management

• Architect centralized prompt repository with versioning, templating, and A/B testing
• Build observability systems tracking token usage, quality metrics, and performance
• Design context engineering pipelines including RAG architectures

Model Development & ML Pipelines

• Train and fine-tune models across supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning paradigms
• Build reproducible training pipelines with experiment tracking and hyperparameter optimization
• Implement feedback loops connecting user corrections to agent self-improvement

Compensation Range: $200,000 - $230,000 USD

Systems & Agentic AI Expertise

• 10+ years building large-scale distributed systems with hands-on Python, Pyspark coding
• 5+ years production AI/ML systems, with 1+ years on agentic AI architectures
• Proven track record building autonomous agents including multi-agent orchestration, tool frameworks, and evaluation infrastructure
• Hands-on experience with agent frameworks: LangChain, LlamaIndex, or custom implementations
• Built governance and safety systems for autonomous agents in production

Production Engineering

• Expert Python and async programming (FastAPI, asyncio, concurrent systems)
• Experience with tool-calling LLMs and agentic protocols (MCP or similar)
• Production experience with LLM observability and distributed tracing
• Deep understanding of multi-agent systems, prompt engineering, and context management
• Event-driven architectures and real-time data pipelines

ML & Data Science

• Strong ML/statistics background with model evaluation, experimentation, and A/B testing
• Experience with model training, fine-tuning, hyperparameter optimization, and feature engineering
• Built data pipelines for training, labeling workflows, and feedback loops
• Time-series analysis, anomaly detection, or process monitoring experience

• Deep tech domain experience: manufacturing, industrial systems, healthcare, finance, or scientific/engineering applications
• Experience translating domain expert knowledge into agent guardrails
• Graph databases or knowledge graph reasoning

• PhD in Statistics, Computer science and relevant field
• Experience as a Data Scientist and strong data experience

• Build real AI agents, not just dashboards. You’ll work on agents that plan, reason, and act across real production environments — not toy demos — with a direct line to customer impact
• Work at the intersection of agentic AI and semiconductors. Help some of the world’s most advanced semiconductor companies flag issues earlier, accelerate root-cause analysis, and optimize yield and quality by giving their engineers powerful autonomous assistants
• Own problems end-to-end. You’ll have the autonomy to take problems from messy data and ambiguous requirements all the way through modeling, deployment, and iteration in production
• Join a small, senior team. Collaborate with experienced engineers, researchers, and product leaders who are deeply invested in pushing the state of the art in agentic AI and shipping it responsibly.
• Shape the platform. Your work will directly influence how our agentic data platform evolves — the types of agents we build, the data abstractions we expose, and the capabilities we deliver to customers

If you’re excited about building AI agents that operate on real, high-stakes data — and want to help redefine how semiconductor companies understand and act on their data — we’d love to talk.

• Comprehensive health & wellness benefits, including medical, dental, vision, HSA, and FSA options
• Voluntary insurance offerings for additional coverage
• 401(k) plan with company match
• Flexible time off and company holidays to support rest and recharge
• Flexible remote work environment
• One-time home office setup stipend
• Ongoing monthly stipend to support your work-from-home needs