
Staff Software Engineer, AI Agent
Required skills
- AI coding agent
- online evals
- offline evals
- monorepos
- shipping features
- AI SDK
- Clickhouse
- Tailwind
- IaC
- CDK
Nice to have
- senior level
- staff level
- exceptional candidates
- US time zones
Role summary
Hercules is seeking a senior or staff level AI Context & Harness Engineer to build and maintain their AI coding agent and associated evaluation systems. The role involves researching methods to improve the agent's efficiency and accuracy, leveraging access to extensive code repositories and chat data. Candidates should possess strong software fundamentals including system design, architecture, data modeling, and API design, along with expertise in context and harness engineering best practices for AI. Experience with TypeScript, React, containers, Postgres, Redis, and Temporal is expected. The company emphasizes shipping quickly, striving for excellence, and a strong work ethic. This is a hybrid role with a strong preference for in-office work in San Francisco, though remote candidates willing to work in US time zones and travel to the office are considered.
What are we looking for?
Hercules is looking for a senior or staff level AI Context & Harness engineer to help us build the future of AI software development
What will you do?
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:
Software fundamentals: system design, architecture, data modeling, and API design
Code and codebase quality: 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
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?
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 ship. We ship fast, iterate, and correct mistakes quickly. Our bias for action speeds up our learning and delights our customers.
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. 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.
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
What’s the compensation?
$100k-$350k + equity (variable based on seniority, equity, and location)
Compensation Range: $100K - $350K
Originally posted on Himalayas
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