🚀 Hermes Web: Call for Founding Engineer

Hermes Web is looking for a founding engineer to build the first polished, hosted personal AI agent product.

Some facts about us:

Incubated by Open Core Ventures, the studio founded by Sid Sijbrandij (ex-CEO of GitLab)
Building the hosted, non-technical-user version of Hermes Agent — the fastest-growing open-source agent framework after OpenClaw
OCV underwrites infrastructure and LLM costs, so you optimize for growth and polish, not unit economics
Fully remote, product-focused, compressed sprint cadence

If you want to own product and engineering end-to-end, ship consumer-grade polish in a space that's still raw, and help define what a mainstream AI agent product looks like, this is for you.

Project described below.

Requirements

High agency, ship fast without hand-holding
Strong Python skills — FastAPI or similar production web framework experience required
Strong frontend skills (React, Next.js, TypeScript) for the chat, memory, and activity surfaces
Experience with auth, billing, and multi-tenancy in production products
Container orchestration experience (Kubernetes, Nomad, ECS, or equivalent)
Experience with AI-native tools (Cursor, Claude Code, model APIs)
Knowledge of agents, LLM gateways, rate limiting, and abuse prevention
Comfortable working across frontend, backend, infrastructure, and AI workflows

The kind of person we want: someone who has shipped a consumer or prosumer product they're still proud of, and who responds to an aggressive timeline with "tight but doable if we cut X, Y, Z" rather than "let me spec it first."

Bonus skills:

Experience with agent frameworks (Hermes, OpenClaw, LangGraph)
LLM gateway or proxy work
Stripe subscription billing at scale
Production experience hardening agentically-generated code
OSS contributions
Consumer AI product experience (Cowork, Cursor, or similar)

Project: Hosted Hermes Agent Platform

1. Introduction

We are building a multi-tenant hosted platform that gives anyone their own personal Hermes agent running in the cloud in under 60 seconds. No terminal, no API keys, no configuration. The agent persists, remembers them, and gets better over time.

This project includes:

Per-user Hermes containers with network and storage isolation
A warm pool provisioning system for instant signup-to-first-message
A production-hardened chat, memory, and activity interface
An LLM gateway that meters usage, enforces caps, and prevents abuse
Bundled Claude Sonnet access — users never see an API key or model selector
Stripe billing infrastructure and self-serve subscription flows

2. Requirements

Platform and provisioning

Per-tenant container orchestration via Kubernetes or Nomad
Warm pool pattern for sub-90-second provisioning
Idle sleep and fast wake (under 2 seconds on incoming message)
Persistent per-tenant memory and conversation storage
Auth via Clerk or Auth0 (email + Google OAuth, email verification required)

Frontend

React, Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind, shadcn
Multi-tenant chat, memory, and activity surfaces
Graceful handling of connection loss, agent timeouts, container restarts
Streaming responses, conversation history, new-thread flows

LLM gateway

Proxy every Anthropic API call from every tenant container
Hold Anthropic API keys server-side; tenant containers never see them
Per-tenant metering with second-by-second granularity
Hard daily and monthly cost caps
Circuit breakers for runaway loops
Ops kill switch for any tenant

Billing and ops

Stripe subscription integration at $20/mo
Self-serve upgrade, downgrade, cancel
Internal ops dashboard for user management and anomaly response
Runbooks for common failure modes

3. Non-Goals

Developer-facing platform
Self-hosted desktop or mobile apps
Skills marketplace or plugin ecosystem
Workflow builder, triggers, scheduled agents
Team accounts, SSO, enterprise features
Multiple LLM providers or model selection
Bring-your-own API key
Forking Hermes — we track upstream and contribute back

4. Prior Art

Hermes Agent — the open-source framework we build the hosted experience on top of
OpenClaw — the largest agent framework today and reference for community patterns and growth dynamics
LangGraph Deep Agents — architecture patterns for stateful long-running agent workflows
Anthropic MCP — server design patterns for tool interfaces and permission-aware context
Cowork (Anthropic) — polish bar and UX patterns for non-technical AI agent products
Cursor agent UI — interaction model for AI agents in consumer products

Open Core Ventures remote jobs

Call for Engineer

Full Stack Software Engineer - Open Core Ventures

Investor - Open Core Ventures

Open Source Software Author/CTO