{"id":1387605,"url":"https://alion.io/job/xheron-ai-harness-engineer-agentic-autonomous-operations-mfx","title":"AI Harness Engineer - Agentic & Autonomous Operations (m/f/x)","company":{"id":689342,"name":"xHeron","domain":"xheron.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/xheron","size_band":"11-50","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Join","truth_index":null},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"junior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Berlin, Germany"],"countries":["DE"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":73000,"max_usd":156000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":9},"experience_years_min":2,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Prompt Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Structured Outputs","optional":false},{"name":"Tool Use","optional":false}],"status":"closed","first_seen_at":"2026-09-14T17:20:37Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-14","last_verified_at":"2026-10-12T16:31:40Z","board_verified":false,"closed_at":"2026-10-12T16:31:40Z","days_open":27,"trust":{"level":"not_scored","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":27},"description":"xHeron is building the Service-as-Software company for short-term rental operators. We take responsibility for guest communication, team coordination and issue resolution, so customers can hand over the work without handing over their business.\nToday, we deliver that service through people, software and AI. We’re turning the expertise behind it into autonomous systems that understand situations, take action and follow through. Not another tool to supervise. A service that gets the job done.\nWe’re looking for an AI Engineer to build the agentic capabilities at the heart of xHeron. You’ll help shape how our agents reason, act and learn, and build a company where AI doesn’t just support the work, but increasingly delivers it.\nTasks\nWe are looking for an AI Harness Engineer to build the software layer that turns language models into dependable operational systems.\nYou will work on orchestration, context assembly, tool execution, state, permissions, evaluations, observability, failure recovery, and human handoffs. The goal is not merely to generate a good response.\nWhat You’ll Own\nAgent harness architecture: Build the control layer around models: task decomposition, state management, model and tool selection, execution loops, checkpoints, retries, stopping conditions, and human handoffs.\nDecision and execution behavior: Design how agents interpret situations, choose actions, manage uncertainty, and complete bounded operational tasks-not only how they generate text.\nContext and memory: Determine what an agent needs to know at each step. Build context assembly, retrieval, memory, evidence selection, and knowledge-maintenance strategies while managing relevance, latency, and cost.\nTools and real-world effects: Connect agents to APIs and operational systems through explicit tool contracts, permissions, validation, idempotency, and confirmation that the intended effect actually occurred.\nEvaluation and regression testing: Build representative evaluation suites and automated tests for decision quality, tool use, task completion, safety, escalation behavior, and recurring failure patterns.\nObservability and failure analysis: Make agent behavior inspectable through structured traces, state, outcomes, and error classification. Diagnose failures across models, prompts, context, tools, and surrounding software.\nContinuous improvement: Use evaluations, production traces, operator feedback, and controlled experiments to improve prompts, context, tools, model choices, and agent architecture.\nProduction ownership: Ship and operate production Python software alongside our CTO and engineering team. Work closely with systems engineering on integrations, authorization, durable state, recovery, and safe execution.\nRequirements\nWhat Makes You a Great Fit\nYou are a strong software engineer who can design, build, test, and operate reliable production systems in Python.\nYou have built a substantial LLM-powered, automation, workflow, or decision system: not only notebooks, chat interfaces, prompt experiments, or a basic retrieval pipeline.\nYou understand the engineering layer around a model: orchestration, state, context, tools, structured outputs, permissions, retries, fallbacks, observability, and evaluations.\nYou can connect intelligence to real work: selecting relevant evidence, making a bounded decision, invoking tools or APIs, and verifying that the intended result occurred.\nYou design for partial failure and uncertainty. You think deliberately about when an agent should act, retry, wait, stop, ask for help, or escalate.\nYou evaluate behavior systematically. You use representative cases, traces, outcome checks, comparisons, and regression tests rather than treating a plausible response as proof of success.\nYou have shipped software that people or operational processes depend on and have worked through debugging, timeouts, inconsistent data, changing APIs, and production incidents.\nYou can investigate ambiguous problems independently, define a useful system boundary, explain trade-offs clearly, and turn decisions into working software.\nYou care about simplicity and control. You know when a deterministic workflow is better than an agent and when additional autonomy is justified by evidence.\nYou bring useful expertise and an independent perspective. Strong adjacent experience in workflow engines, developer tooling, distributed systems, automation platforms, or integration-heavy backend software can be highly relevant when paired with credible LLM-system understanding.\nAround 2+ years of professional software-engineering experience is a useful guide, not a hard requirement. What matters is the technical depth of what you built, the decisions and production outcomes you owned, and your ability to learn unfamiliar systems.\nYou May Not Be a Great Fit If\nYour LLM experience is mainly prompt engineering, chatbots, basic RAG, or connecting a model API to a user interface.\nYour background is primarily offline data analysis, model training, or experimentation, and you do not want to own production software and operational behavior.\nYou treat retrieval as the complete agent architecture rather than one possible source of context within a larger execution system.\nYou consider a coherent model response successful without verifying the decision, tool call, state change, or real-world outcome.\nYou rely on an agent framework to provide the system design and are not comfortable reasoning about the control flow, state, permissions, and failure behavior underneath it.\nYou are not interested in owning evaluations, trace analysis, regression testing, and production learning alongside feature development.\nYou prefer fully scoped implementation tasks with stable requirements and limited responsibility for product or operational outcomes.\nBenefits\nReal ownership: you're not maintaining someone else's codebase, you're building a core, novel part of the product from the ground up.\nBuild at the core. Own a defining part of xHeron’s technology, from the first architectural decisions to production.\nShape the direction. Work directly with our CTO, challenge assumptions and help decide what we build, not just how.\nGrow beyond the job description. We invest in your development, with room to expand your ownership and take on technical leadership as xHeron grows.\nShare in the upside. Salary plus VSOP participation, so you can benefit from the value you help create.\nOur Process\nIntro call (15-30 min): a conversation with Friedrich (CTO) about your background, what you've built, and why this role.\nTechnical take-home case study: a short, real engineering problem, close to what you'd actually be building.\nCase study interview (1 hour): you walk us through your thinking, not just the final code.\nCulture fit (30 min): meet both Founders and make sure it's a fit both ways.","description_format":"text","description_chars":6837,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":2,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Hotels & Resorts"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-28T10:52:19Z"},{"event":"close","at":"2026-10-12T16:31:40Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":null,"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/xheron-ai-harness-engineer-agentic-autonomous-operations-mfx","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/xheron-ai-harness-engineer-agentic-autonomous-operations-mfx.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-20T02:55:40Z","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_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":3212,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-21T00:00:00Z"}},"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":689342},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=689342"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fxheron-ai-harness-engineer-agentic-autonomous-operations-mfx"},{"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%2Fxheron-ai-harness-engineer-agentic-autonomous-operations-mfx"},{"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%2Fxheron-ai-harness-engineer-agentic-autonomous-operations-mfx"},{"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/xheron-ai-harness-engineer-agentic-autonomous-operations-mfx\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fxheron-ai-harness-engineer-agentic-autonomous-operations-mfx"}]}