Software Development Engineer (SDE- III)

Who We Are

Emergence is a thematic holding company backed by the Pritzker Organization focused exclusively on acquiring and scaling category-defining software businesses. We invest in focused portfolios, specialized operating groups with deep domain expertise and proven playbooks. Emergence combines operational rigor with a growth equity mindset, driving sustainable ARR growth, profitability improvements, and industry-leading customer outcomes.

The Mission

Build reliable backend systems across portfolio companies that scale with the business and ship features that directly impact customers.

What You'll Do

• Design and implement microservices and APIs that handle production traffic with measurable uptime and latency targets
• Identify and fix performance bottlenecks in code or infrastructure, quantifying the impact of your optimizations
• Ship features end-to-end from specification through production, including tests, code review, and incident response
• Propose architecture solutions backed by load estimates or proof-of-concept results to address scalability challenges
• Build logging, monitoring, and alerting systems that surface actionable issues before they impact users
• Mentor junior engineers through code review and pairing to accelerate their ability to ship independently

What We're Looking For

Must-haves

• Proficiency in at least one backend language (Python, Node.js) with shipped production systems
• 4+ years of experience in software development.
• Comfortable with writing majority code using AI
• Experience designing and debugging microservices or distributed systems with REST APIs
• Strong SQL skills and proven ability to optimize database queries and schema design
• Track record owning features end-to-end from design through production deployment
• Comfortable shipping code in moving environments and debugging production issues under pressure
• Working knowledge of ORMs like Prisma and relational databases like PostgreSQL
• Familiarity with background job queues and scheduled task management
• Experience with Redis or Redis-compatible systems for caching and pub-sub
• Good product sense & have built end-to-end projects or products, including frontend/design

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with containerization tools like Docker or Kubernetes
• Familiarity with message queues or event streaming platforms like Kafka or RabbitMQ
• Exposure to cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure
• Experience with JWT-based authentication and session management
• Familiarity with AWS CloudWatch or similar logging and monitoring tools

Who you are

You spot performance gaps in systems you inherit and fix them because the problem bothers you, not because someone assigned it. You've expanded your scope by pulling infrastructure problems toward yourself. You change your mind about technical decisions when peers present better data. You credit teammates unprompted when describing shipped work. You rewrite your own code before review if it doesn't meet your bar for clarity and testability. You refuse to ship flawed work under deadline pressure.

What We Offer

• Competitive salary aligned with market rates for backend engineers
• Fully remote with flexible work hours
• Professional development budget for courses, conferences, and certifications