Senior Staff Software Engineer

About Hercules

Hercules is an AI-driven app builder that helps businesses create custom applications. A small founding team supports hundreds of thousands of active users and a rapidly growing platform. The company is backed by Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst.

The opportunity

Work directly with the founding team as one of the first dedicated infrastructure engineers on a team of approximately seven. Take ownership of infrastructure currently managed by the co-founder and help scale reliable systems for hundreds of thousands of applications, while maintaining an excellent developer experience.

What you will do

• Own infrastructure reliability, uptime, scaling and on-call responsibilities.
• Design and evolve systems for long-running AI agents, durable workflows and multi-tenant application hosting.
• Build and operate workflow orchestration using Temporal or a comparable production system; design robust recovery for partial failures.
• Manage cloud infrastructure as code using CDK or Terraform, and orchestrate fleets of servers or containers.
• Design, scale and tune production databases; the platform uses Postgres, Redis and ClickHouse.
• Partner with the founders to drive ambiguous technical goals through architecture, implementation, production launch and ongoing improvement.
• Use AI coding tools daily to accelerate delivery while maintaining a high bar for technical quality.

Mandatory requirements / dealbreakers

• End-to-end ownership: Has owned and shipped an entire product module, such as authentication/access management, CMS, email, files or billing; experience must extend beyond small features and bug fixes.
• Production workflow orchestration: Hands-on experience with Temporal or a comparable durable workflow orchestrator, such as Cadence or AWS Step Functions.
• Infrastructure as code and fleet operations: Manages infrastructure in CDK or Terraform and has orchestrated servers or containers, for example Kubernetes or Docker on AWS.

Required background

• Typically 2 - 10 years of experience in infrastructure, platform or backend engineering, with senior or staff-level ownership and technical depth.
• At least 1 year at a fast-growing startup with fewer than approximately 150 employees, ideally pre-Series C, or at a high-bar developer tools or product company. Founder and YC startup experience count.
• Deep production database experience spanning schema design, scaling and performance tuning.
• Daily use of AI coding tools, with the ability to explain a practical workflow using tools such as Claude Code, Cursor or background agents.
• A clear record of shipping, strong autonomy, urgency, excellent communication and increasing scope of responsibility. Evidence may include launches, meaningful GitHub contributions, open-source work or technical writing.

Nice to have

• Infrastructure for AI agents or ML workloads, including long-running jobs, model routing, inference or GPU orchestration.
• Experience with Kubernetes, AWS and the Hercules stack: TypeScript, React and Postgres.

Location and compensation

The founding team works in-office in San Francisco. Candidates should be able to work on-site five days per week or relocate. A remote arrangement may be considered for an exceptional candidate, but is not the default.

Base salary is $200K - $300K, plus equity, with a flexible cash/equity split and up to 0.25% equity for exceptional engineers.

Interview process

Initial screening (15 minutes) / system design interview (30 minutes) / live AI-assisted coding challenge (1 hour) / final team interview (30 minutes). The final interview focuses on end-to-end ownership, product judgment and simple user experiences.

Pay: $200,000.00 - $300,000.00 per year

Work Location: In person