{"id":1880568,"url":"https://alion.io/job/hercules-staff-software-engineer-ai-agent","title":"Staff Software Engineer, AI Agent","company":{"id":456046,"name":"Hercules","domain":"hercules.app","url":"https://alion.io/company/hercules-2","size_band":"11-50","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":95,"open_postings":6,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":220,"computed_at":"2026-10-06T05:45:30Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":100000,"max":350000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":350000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Anthropic","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"ClickHouse","optional":false},{"name":"Cloudflare","optional":false},{"name":"Docker","optional":false},{"name":"OpenAI","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":false},{"name":"Prompt Caching","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Redis","optional":false},{"name":"Tailwind CSS","optional":false},{"name":"Terraform","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"Vercel AI SDK","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-04T21:27:11Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-04","last_verified_at":"2026-10-07T00:20:15Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":2,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":2},"description":"What are we looking for?\nHercules is looking for a senior or staff level AI Context & Harness engineer to help us build the future of AI software development\nWhat will you do?\nBuild, maintain, and own Hercules' AI coding agent\n\nBuild, maintain, and own Hercules' online evals and offline evals\n\nResearch novel ways to make our agent cheaper, faster, and more accurate (you will have access to 1M+ repos and millions of chat messages)\n\nWhat skills do we expect you to have?\nWe expect candidates to be incredibly strong across all of the following areas:\nSoftware fundamentals: system design, architecture, data modeling, and API design\n\nCode and codebase quality: write clean, maintainable code. Work effectively in monorepos\n\nProduct/design sense: track record of independently shipping lots of features to customers\n\nContext 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\nYes, 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\n\nOur core stack: TypeScript, React, containers, Postgres, Redis, and Temporal\n\nAI coding: able to truly 10x your workflow by being on frontier of AI coding\n\nWhat’s Hercules’ stack?\nTechnologies: Typescript, React, AI SDK, Postgres, Redis, Clickhouse, Tailwind, IaC (CDK, Terraform), Docker, Otel, Hono, Drizzle ORM, Temporal\n\nClouds: Cloudflare, AWS\n\nAI Models: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google\n\nWhat are Hercules’ operating principles?\nHercules’ 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:\nWe ship. We ship fast, iterate, and correct mistakes quickly. Our bias for action speeds up our learning and delights our customers.\n\nWe 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.\n\nWe 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.\n\nIs Hercules in-office or remote?\nHercules 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.\nWhat are Hercules’ benefits?\nUnlimited AI token budget\n\nTake what you need vacation policy\n\nHealthcare, vision, and dental\n\nDaily lunches, dinners and snacks in the office\n\nWe guarantee you will do the best work of your career here\n\nWhat’s the compensation?\n$100k-$350k + equity (variable based on seniority, equity, and location)","description_format":"text","description_chars":3119,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Search Engine Optimization (SEO)"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-04T23:52:27Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":1,"expected_fill_days":220,"reasons":["conf:0","velocity","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-06T05:45:30Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":350000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/hercules-staff-software-engineer-ai-agent","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/hercules-staff-software-engineer-ai-agent.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-07T01:34:22Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":2560,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":2440,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-10-08T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":456046},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=456046"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fhercules-staff-software-engineer-ai-agent"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fhercules-staff-software-engineer-ai-agent"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fhercules-staff-software-engineer-ai-agent"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/hercules-staff-software-engineer-ai-agent\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fhercules-staff-software-engineer-ai-agent"}]}