About Hercules
Hercules helps finance and operations leaders solve problems that are too complex, large-scale, or time-consuming for human teams to manage alone. Its platform automates the validation and verification of data across millions of high-volume, rules-based transactions, improving billing accuracy, reducing costs, and accelerating cash flow. Built on a modular, multi-AI agent architecture, Hercules delivers industry-specific solutions for staffing, insurance, government, and financial services. Its accuracy and consistency enable enterprises to achieve levels of precision and speed that were previously out of reach.
Headquartered in the United States, Hercules also has offices in the United Kingdom, Armenia, Canada, and Portugal.
About the role
We're looking for a Tech Lead who is first and foremost a builder: someone who writes code, ships systems, and leads by doing. You'll set technical direction, own architecture, and be the main contributor across our stack while developing a high-performing engineering team.
Product thinking is central to this role. You'll work closely with Product and stakeholders to deeply understand customer problems, translate ambiguous requirements into clear technical solutions, and ensure every engineering decision connects to real business impact. You won't just build what's asked. you'll challenge, validate, and shape what gets built.
You'll also bring practical AI expertise: integrating LLMs into production systems, tuning behavior, optimizing inference pipelines, and ensuring AI capabilities deliver reliable, real-world outcomes.
What you'll do
Product Thinking & Communication
- Partner with Product and stakeholders to understand workflows, needs, and problem spaces
- Translate ambiguous requirements into clear technical plans and system designs
- Validate solutions through real usage and feedback loops, not just specs
- Communicate progress, risks, and trade-offs clearly to technical and non-technical audiences
- Ensure engineering work is always anchored to customer value and business outcomes
Technical Leadership & Building
- Design and evolve system architecture for scalable, reliable platforms
- Contribute directly to core systems across the full stack: frontend, backend, and infrastructure
- Own key technical decisions and guide architectural direction
- Drive best practices across CI/CD, testing, observability, and release processes
- Deliver outcomes end-to-end, from design through production
AI & Intelligent Systems
- Build and integrate AI-powered capabilities into production systems
- Tune model behavior, evaluate outputs, and iterate toward reliable results
- Design and optimize inference pipelines with attention to latency, cost, and reliability
- Apply LLM capabilities (tool-use, prompt design, evaluation) to solve real problems, not research
People Leadership
- Lead and develop engineers through coaching, feedback, and growth support
- Practice servant leadership: remove blockers, enable success, set the standard through your own work
- Build a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement
Requirements
- 7+ years of professional software engineering experience with strong production ownership
- Proven track record as a Tech Lead or senior engineer who drives both systems and teams
- Strong product instinct with the ability to connect technical decisions to customer value
- Full-stack capability with depth in Python and backend systems
- Practical experience with AI/LLM-powered systems in production, or strong ability to ramp quickly
- Excellent communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences
- Experience coaching and developing engineers
- Comfortable operating in fast-paced, ambiguous environments
Nice to Have
- Experience with architectural patterns such as DDD, CQRS, or event-driven design
- Background in data-intensive or enterprise-scale systems
- Familiarity with systems-level languages (Go, Rust) or modern frontend frameworks (React)
Soft Skills & Mindset
- Leads by example, combining execution with leadership
- Uses communication as a primary tool for alignment and clarity
- Takes ownership from problem definition to delivered outcome
- Thrives in ambiguity and brings structure
- Invests in people, mentorship, and team growth
- Balances speed with quality and long-term thinking
