--- title: Staff Software Engineer, AI Agent at Hercules description: Hercules is hiring for the Staff Software Engineer, AI Agent role in San Francisco, CA. See the full description and apply. type: job url: https://www.foundrole.com/jobs/staff-software-engineer-ai-agent-at-hercules-01a10f5c-5085-75b1-883c-77ef6863d9f6 date: 2026-10-06T04:19:21Z og_description: Join Hercules as Staff Software Engineer, AI Agent in San Francisco, CA. Pays $100K–$350K per year. Full-time, hybrid role. og_image: https://www.foundrole.com/og/b5t0dp.png breadcrumbs: - label: Home url: https://www.foundrole.com/ - label: Search url: https://www.foundrole.com/jobs --- | | | |---|---| | **Company** | hercules.app | | **Location** | San Francisco, CA (Hybrid) | | **Salary** | $100K/yr - $350K/yr | | **Type** | Full Time | | **Posted** | Oct 04, 2026 | ## Description **What are we looking for?** [Hercules](https://hercules.app) 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: 1. **We ship**. We ship fast, iterate, and correct mistakes quickly. Our bias for action speeds up our learning and delights our customers. 2. **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. 3. **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) ## Skills - Temporal - Amazon Web Services - Infrastructure as Code (IaC) - Systems Design - Caching - Prompt Engineering - Docker - Artificial Intelligence - PostgreSQL - Anthropic Claude - ClickHouse - Terraform - Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Rag) - Cloudflare - OpenAI - Text Summarization - Hono - Tailwind CSS - AI-Assisted Coding - LLM Evals - AWS Cloud Development Kit (Cdk) - Software Development Kit (Sdk) - TypeScript - Redis - API Design - Data Modeling - Asynchronous Programming - OpenTelemetry - Drizzle ORM - Monorepo ## Related - [Data & Analytics jobs](https://www.foundrole.com/careers/data-and-analytics?utm_source=ai_markdown)- [Machine Learning & AI jobs](https://www.foundrole.com/careers/data-and-analytics/machine-learning-and-ai?utm_source=ai_markdown)- [Artificial Intelligence Engineer jobs](https://www.foundrole.com/careers/data-and-analytics/machine-learning-and-ai/artificial-intelligence-engineer?utm_source=ai_markdown)- [Browse all companies](https://www.foundrole.com/companies?utm_source=ai_markdown) ## Explore this job market - [California](https://www.foundrole.com/locations/us/california?utm_source=ai_markdown) — 264806 jobs - [Software Products](https://www.foundrole.com/sectors/technology/software-products?utm_source=ai_markdown) — 117493 jobs - [San Francisco, CA](https://www.foundrole.com/locations/us/california/san-francisco?utm_source=ai_markdown) — 26836 jobs ## Related pages - [California](https://www.foundrole.com/locations/us/california?utm_source=ai_markdown) — 264806 jobs - [Software Products](https://www.foundrole.com/sectors/technology/software-products?utm_source=ai_markdown) — 117493 jobs - [San Francisco, CA](https://www.foundrole.com/locations/us/california/san-francisco?utm_source=ai_markdown) — 26836 jobs ## Browse - [Companies](https://www.foundrole.com/companies?utm_source=ai_markdown) - [Jobs by country](https://www.foundrole.com/locations?utm_source=ai_markdown) - [Jobs in the United States by state and city](https://www.foundrole.com/locations/us?utm_source=ai_markdown) - [H1B sponsors by location](https://www.foundrole.com/h1b-sponsors?utm_source=ai_markdown) - [H1B salaries](https://www.foundrole.com/h1b-salaries?utm_source=ai_markdown) - [Sectors and industries](https://www.foundrole.com/sectors?utm_source=ai_markdown) - [Jobs by career field](https://www.foundrole.com/careers?utm_source=ai_markdown) - [Latest jobs](https://www.foundrole.com/jobs/latest?utm_source=ai_markdown)