AI Context & Harness Product Manager

What are we looking for?

Hercules is looking for a senior or staff level product manager to own our AI coding agent.

What will you do?

• Your #1 and only goal is to make Hercules' AI coding agent cheaper, faster, and more accurate (our pareto frontier)

• You will own Hercules' entire context/harness system design (which includes system prompt, tools, memory, skills, summarization/compression, hooks, codebase design etc)

• You will own Hercules' online evals and offline evals

• You will leverage our 100k+ users, 200k+ code repos, and millions of chat threads to guide your experimentation.

What skills do we expect you to have?

We expect candidates to be incredibly strong across all of the following areas:

• Software fundamentals: You are building an AI coding agent. We expect you to be technical and able to code. We expect you to have a decent understanding of system design, architecture, data modeling, and API design. In saying this, you will work with an engineering counterpart to work on complex implementation

• Product sense: strong intuition for the goals customers are trying to achieve and novel solutions to help them achieve them

• Design sense: Track record of building simple, delightful UX/UI that makes it easy for customers to achieve their goals

• AI context and harness engineering: strong experience with the most up to date context and harness engineering best practices like summarization/compression, prompting, prompt caching, subagents, memory, context management, tools, async tools, deferred tools, 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, (some sort of agent framework like AI SDK), (some sort of eval platform like LangSmith)

• AI: 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 is 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-$250k + equity (variable based on seniority, equity, and location)