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Salary: USD 100,000 - 300,000 / annual
Hercules is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the development of its platform-as-a-service, which powers AI software development. You will own the technical direction and execution across multiple critical systems:
**Core Responsibilities:**
- Lead the Hercules Database: an enterprise-grade, database-like object model with flexible schemas and fine-grained access controls (similar to Salesforce's Force.com or Airtable)
- Build and scale Backend Services: a fast, scalable backend-as-a-service tightly integrated with the Hercules Database
- Design APIs & SDKs: create interfaces that AI agents use to build on the platform
- Optimize Performance & Scale: engineer for low latency, high throughput, and efficient resource utilization
- Build Hosting & Infrastructure: develop and operate the infrastructure running customer applications with strong tenant isolation, observability, and failure resilience
**About Hercules:**
Hercules is an AI software development platform built by a founding team working in-office in San Francisco. The company operates on three core principles: shipping fast and iterating quickly, striving for excellence in all outputs, and maintaining a hungry, action-oriented culture.
**Tech Stack:**
TypeScript, React, AI SDK, Postgres, Redis, Clickhouse, Tailwind, Infrastructure-as-Code (CDK, Terraform), Docker, OpenTelemetry, Hono, Drizzle ORM, Temporal. Cloud infrastructure on Cloudflare and AWS. AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
**Requirements:**
- Exceptional software fundamentals: system design, architecture, data modeling, and API design
- Strong code quality discipline: write clean, maintainable code and work effectively in monorepos
- Production-level Rust expertise: build efficient, reliable systems
- Deep data systems knowledge: indexing, query performance, transactions, consistency
- Infrastructure expertise: scale large, data-intensive, multi-tenant, distributed services
- Performance optimization skills: optimize latency, throughput, and resource efficiency
- AI fluency: ability to leverage frontier AI tools to 10x your workflow
The company strongly prefers in-office work in San Francisco (Kearny and Bush locations) but is open to remote arrangements for exceptional candidates willing to work US time zones and travel to the office regularly.
