Staff Software Engineer, AI Agent

is looking for a senior or staff level AI Context & Harness engineer to help us build the future of AI software development

About Hercules

Hercules’ operating principles guide how we make decisions every day. We take them very seriously. Most of the principles can be learned on the job, however, we do specifically filter for the following principles in our hiring process:

We strive for excellence.

Doing things well is in our DNA. We have good taste. We get the details right. Our outputs are exceptionally simple and self-serve. We’re proud of our work.

We are hungry

Responsibilities

Build, maintain, and own Hercules' AI coding agent

• Build, maintain, and own Hercules' online evals and offline evals
• Research novel ways to make our agent cheaper, faster, and more accurate (you will have access to 1M+ repos and millions of chat messages)

What skills do we expect you to have?

• We expect candidates to be incredibly strong across all of the following areas:
• : system design, architecture, data modeling, and API design: write clean, maintainable code. Work effectively in monorepos Product/design sense: track record of independently shipping lots of features to customers
• Context and harness engineering skills: strong experience with the most up to date context and harness engineering best practices like summarization/compression, prompting, prompt caching, subagents, memory, dreaming, context management, tools, async tools, deferred tools, RAG, skills, etc
• We ship. We ship fast, iterate, and correct mistakes quickly. Our bias for action speeds up our learning and delights our customers.

Requirements

• Hercules
• Code and codebase quality
• Yes, we know this industry is evolving rapidly and the "best practices" change every week, but yes, we are still actively looking for someone who has wrestled with these challenges at scale and has strong opinions about what works and what doesn't Our core stack: TypeScript, React, containers, Postgres, Redis, and Temporal AI coding: able to truly 10x your workflow by being on frontier of AI coding
• What’s Hercules’ stack?
• Technologies: Typescript, React, AI SDK, Postgres, Redis, Clickhouse, Tailwind, IaC (CDK, Terraform), Docker, Otel, Hono, Drizzle ORM, Temporal
• Clouds: Cloudflare, AWS
• AI Models: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google
• What are Hercules’ operating principles?
• . We are willing to work hard and break through walls to achieve the outcomes we want. We are willing to operate at any level to get things done.
• Is Hercules in-office or remote?
• Hercules founding team works in-office in San Francisco (Kearny and Bush). We have a very strong preference for in office. We are open to remote for exceptional candidates who are willing to 1) work in US time zones and 2) travel to the office regularly.

Pay

$100k-$350k + equity (variable based on seniority, equity, and location)

Benefits

• What are Hercules’ benefits?
• Unlimited AI token budget
• Take what you need vacation policy
• Healthcare, vision, and dental
• Daily lunches, dinners and snacks in the office
• We guarantee you will do the best work of your career here