Software Engineer, Full Stack - UK

About Ema Ema builds AI Employees for HR, IT and Finance. Our AI Employees take on the busy work across the employee experience, from recruiting, onboarding and benefits to IT support, invoice processing and payroll, so people can spend their time on work that needs them. Founded by former executives from Google, Coinbase, Flipkart, and Okta, our team includes engineers from premier tech companies and graduates of Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley, CMU, and IITs. We are backed by industry leading investors including Accel, Naspers/Prosus, Creaegis, Section32, and angels like Sheryl Sandberg and Dustin Moskovitz. Headquartered in Silicon Valley and with offices in London, Bangalore and Vancouver, Ema is at the frontier of what Agentic AI can do in production. We ship real systems that run real business processes at scale. The Role You'll be an engineer who builds AI agents in production, sitting close to the customers who depend on them. This is a full-stack engineering job with an unusually short distance between your code and someone's actual workday. You'll write Go and Python, design schemas, build evals, and present your solution to a senior executive at an enterprise - often in the same week. What You'll Do • Design and ship production agents. You'll build agents that are mission-critical from day one: embedded in Teams, Slack, intranets, voice lines, and email, taking real actions against SAP, ServiceNow, Workday, and a long tail of systems nobody has heard of. These run at enterprise volume under enterprise scrutiny. • Own the full lifecycle. Discovery, build, eval, launch, and the unglamorous months afterward where an agent goes from good to genuinely reliable. • Work directly with the people whose problem it is. You'll sit with leaders at global enterprises, extract the process from their heads, and decide what should be an agent, what should be a workflow, and what should stay human. • Push your work back into the platform. The best patterns you find in the field become part of Ema's core product - new connectors, new agent primitives, new tooling. You'll surface unmet needs and prototype the fix, working with product and platform engineering to make it general. Example Projects Recent work by our engineers: • Built the orchestration layer for a 200,000+ employee IT services firm spanning 65 countries, unifying HR, IT, and payroll into a single interface across SAP, ServiceNow, and Teams. • Rebuilt a recruiting firm's core stack - sourcing, screening, ranked shortlists - cutting time-to-hire by 67% and retiring their legacy ATS along the way. • Cut first-response time from two hours to under 90 seconds for an e-commerce logistics platform, including live carrier-site lookups, and held SLAs through peak holiday volume with no temporary hiring. What You'll Bring • Experience building and scaling end-to-end production systems, with 5+ years of relevant engineering work • Strong backend fundamentals - algorithms, data modeling, and comfort in more than one language, Python and Go especially • Proven problem-solving in fast-changing, ambiguous environments where the requirements arrive in a meeting rather than a ticket • A builder's mindset and high agency - you find a way to ship rather than waiting for the blocker to clear • Comfort working directly with customers • Clear, direct communication with technical and non-technical audiences alike Even Better • You've built or deployed LLM systems in production, and have opinions about evals • Familiarity with agent tooling, RAG pipelines, MCP, and prompt engineering as an engineering discipline rather than a trick • You've been a founder or founding engineer, and know how to balance craft against speed • Experience integrating enterprise applications - HRIS, ITSM,