Engineering Lead- Forward Deployed Engineering

Who we are

Ema is building the world’s largest agentic AI platform to revolutionize enterprise productivity. Our proprietary technology enables companies to delegate repetitive tasks to Ema, the Universal AI employee, unlocking 10x gains in workforce efficiency. Founded by ex-Google, Coinbase, Flipkart, and Okta executives, we bring deep product and scaling expertise to this mission. Our team includes top engineers from Google, Microsoft Research, Facebook, Square, and Coinbase, and alumni of Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley, CMU, and IITs.

We’ve raised over $60M from top-tier investors including Accel, Naspers/Prosus, Section32, SCB10X, Sozo Ventures, Hitachi Ventures, and prominent angels like Sheryl Sandberg, Jerry Yang, and Dustin Moskovitz. Ema is headquartered in Silicon Valley with a second hub in Bangalore, India. This is a hybrid role requiring in-office work three days per week.

Role Overview

Ema is on a mission to redefine the future of work by building a Universal AI Employee that empowers every worker to delegate repetitive, high-value tasks to intelligent, agentic AI systems. As the Engineering Lead on our Forward Deployment Engineering (FDE) team, you’ll play a pivotal role in translating this vision into real-world impact. From discovery workshops to production deployments, you will lead the design of scalable, secure, and observable AI-powered workflows—turning customer ambitions into enterprise-grade solutions that deliver measurable value.

Roles and Responsibilities:

• Workflow Discovery & Solution Design: Lead discovery workshops to understand human workflows, pain points, data flows, and integration needs. Translate business objectives into AI architecture blueprints covering integration, data, security, and success metrics. Author and maintain “AI-Employee” design documents to guide implementation from blueprint to SLOs.

• Data Integration & Action Building: Use declarative connectors and APIs to ingest, normalize, and secure data from enterprise systems (CRM, ERP, ATS, etc.). Build and maintain reusable action blocks using REST/SOAP/RPA and integrate them into agent-based workflows.

• Agentic Reasoning & Prompt Engineering: Design and compose reasoning agents using modern frameworks (e.g., LangChain, Semantic Kernel). Tune prompts, set up memory management, and define mesh topologies to ensure robust agentic reasoning. Own prompt evaluation, experiment design (A/A, A/B), and rollback strategies.

• Human-AI Interaction: Define and implement user interaction flows by integrating with Slack, Microsoft Teams, widgets, or customer-facing apps. Ensure seamless handoff between automated and human-in-the-loop experiences.

• Monitoring, Metrics & Observability: Define success metrics, KPIs, and SLOs; wire them into dashboards, alerts, and observability systems. Steward observability packs, including Terraform/Helm configurations and alerting strategies.

• Security, Identity & Permissions: Enforce zero-trust identity patterns including SSO (Okta/AD) and RBAC. Own auditing, access control, and compliance posture across deployments.

• Collaboration & Continuous Improvement: Lead technical, architectural, and security reviews with internal teams and customer stakeholders. Partner with FDE's and system integrators to unblock issues and ensure deployment success. Monitor production system health and performance, lead continuous-improvement sprints, and codify learnings into reusable playbooks and runbooks. Maintain registries of versioned prompts, connectors, and action templates to support scale and reuse. Channel field insights to Product and ML teams to refine roadmap and platform capabilities.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in software/solutions architecture, including 3+ years with LLM or event-driven systems

• Expert in Python, REST/JSON APIs, and cloud infrastructure (GCP, AWS, or Azure)

• Proven record deploying AI systems in enterprise environments

• Familiarity with agent frameworks like LangChain, Semantic Kernel, or similar

• Experience integrating SaaS platforms like CRM, ATS, ERP

• Strong understanding of RBAC, SSO (Okta/AD), and security standards

• Outstanding communication and executive presence in high-stakes environments

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with SQL optimization, graph DBs, or real-time processing

• Hands-on knowledge of Terraform, Helm, and infrastructure-as-code

• Prior work in FedRAMP, HIPAA, or similar compliance environments

• Open-source contributions in AI infrastructure or observability domains

Soft Skills:

• Ownership & Accountability: You drive end-to-end outcomes, not just deliverables

• Curiosity & Learning: You seek emerging tools and best practices in GenAI

• Collaboration: You thrive at the intersection of product, engineering, and customer success

• Empathy & Clarity: You simplify the complex and build trust through communication

Ema Unlimited is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, or genetics.