AI Engineer
About Emergence
Emergence is a San Francisco based venture capital firm founded in 2003, focused on enterprise SaaS and AI. Over two decades, the firm has quietly become one of the most successful in venture – 20+ exits over $500M, $8B+ in realized returns on under $2B invested, top decile performance.
The numbers speak for themselves: 90%+ of early investments secure follow-on funding, 20%+ exceed $1B valuations, and 10%+ go public. The portfolio includes category-defining companies like Salesforce, Veeva, Box, Zoom, Gusto, Ironclad, Together AI, Mercor, Unify, Physical Intelligence, and Bedrock.
What sets Emergence apart is how they invest. Each Partner makes just one investment per year – enabling the team to go deep and bring the full weight of the firm's network and expertise to every company. The firm has zero Partner turnover and a culture of developing talent internally. The team you start with is the team that sees you through, from first check to IPO and beyond.
The Opportunity
We're hiring an AI Engineer to build intelligent systems that give our team and portfolio companies an unfair advantage. This isn't about tinkering with tools or running experiments. It's about shipping production-grade AI that changes how a venture firm operates and scales.
In a given week, you might build a pipeline that synthesizes research across hundreds of companies, ship a tool that helps our talent team convert the best candidates, or stand up an agent workflow because an investor on our team mentioned a bottleneck.
You'll build AI-powered agents and workflows that:
Supercharge our investment team: contextual research on founders and markets, intelligent deal flow tracking, an AI copilot that helps us pattern-match across 20+ years of enterprise investing.
Outcome-focused: Help our portfolio companies win the talent war – building AI that finds, engages, and converts the best candidates before anyone else can.
Create leverage across the firm: from LP reporting to market analysis to internal knowledge management. If it can be automated intelligently, we want it built.
You Might Be a Fit If You:
Have a deep understanding of what's possible (and what's not) with today's LLMs, agents, and tooling – you can help build workflows and applications in Python, TypeScript, or low-code platforms like n8n, etc.
You're plugged into the AI tooling ecosystem and stay current on emerging technology
Have shipped real products, not just prototypes – and can show them.
Move fast without breaking things. Urgency and quality aren't tradeoffs for you.
Think in systems, not scripts. You build architecture that lasts.
Care about design and usability. Internal tools should feel good to use.
Are high agency. You don't wait to be told what to build – you see the opportunity and go.
Have deep user empathy – since our users are our internal investment and operations teams, that means you engage with these folks on a weekly basis to gather feedback.
Get excited about showing people what they didn't know was possible.
We don't care where you went to school or what's on your resume. If you've shipped exceptional work and can prove it, we want to talk!
Why Emergence
Real impact: You'll build systems used daily by our investment team and portfolio founders. No shelf-ware.
No bureaucracy: Small team, fast decisions, direct access to partners.
Exceptional network: Work alongside 118 companies and some of the best enterprise founders in the world.
High stakes: We believe the right person in this role can fundamentally transform how we operate – and how our portfolio companies compete for talent.
Note: This role is based in San Francisco with anchor days in-office Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday.