AI Engineer - Agentic & Autonomous Operations (m/f/x)

Title: AI Engineer - Agentic & Autonomous Operations (m/f/x) Location: Berlin, Germany **xHeron is building the Service-as-Software company for short-term rental operators.** We take responsibility for guest communication, team coordination and issue resolution, so customers can hand over the work without handing over their business. Today, we deliver that service through people, software and AI. We’re turning the expertise behind it into autonomous systems that understand situations, take action and follow through. **Not another tool to supervise. A service that gets the job done.** We’re looking for an **AI Engineer** to build the agentic capabilities at the heart of xHeron. You’ll help shape how our agents reason, act and learn, and build a company where AI doesn’t just support the work, but increasingly delivers it. ## Tasks **What You'll Own** * Agent behavior & reasoning: Build and improve multi-step agent behavior, including reasoning, tool use, and human handoffs. * Context & retrieval: Develop context and retrieval strategies that connect agents to relevant operational knowledge and reusable expertise. * Evaluation & testing: Build evaluations and regression tests to measure decision quality, task completion, and failure patterns. * Continuous improvement: Use production traces and operator feedback to improve models, prompts, and agent architecture. * Production ownership: Ship and maintain production code alongside our CTO and engineering team, working closely with systems engineering on safe execution. ## Requirements **What Makes You a Great Fit** * Strong software engineering fundamentals and practical Python experience. * Hands-on experience building an LLM application that uses tools or carries out multiple steps, not just experimenting in chat interfaces. * Experience shipping software for real users, including testing and debugging. * A systematic approach to assessing AI quality through tests, traces, and comparisons. * The ability to investigate unclear problems, explain trade-offs, and turn decisions into working software. * You draw on your experience to develop practical solutions and bring an independent perspective to technical challenges and system design. Around 2+ years of software engineering experience is a useful guide, not a hard requirement. What you've built and understood matters more. Nice to have: TypeScript/Node.js (especially for backend services or agents), experience with LLM evaluations, retrieval or memory systems, and familiarity with an agent framework. We don't expect you to know every tool or have a research background. **You May Not Be a Great Fit If** * You need a fully scoped spec instead of investigating ambiguous problems yourself. * You've never shipped software that real users depend on. * You're not interested in owning the quality bar and evaluations, not just building features. * You're looking for a defined 9-to-5 ## Benefits Real ownership: you're not maintaining someone else's codebase, you're building a core, novel part of the product from the ground up. * **Build at the core.** Own a defining part of xHeron’s technology, from the first architectural decisions to production. * **Shape the direction.** Work directly with our CTO, challenge assumptions and help decide what we build, not just how. * **Grow beyond the job description.** We invest in your development, with room to expand your ownership and take on technical leadership as xHeron grows. * **Share in the upside.** Salary plus VSOP participation, so you can benefit from the value you help create. **Our Process** * Intro call (30 min): a conversation with Friedrich (CTO) about your background, what you've built, and why this role. * Technical take-home case study: a short, real engineering problem, close to what you'd actually be building. * Case study interview (1 hour): you walk us through your thinking, not just the final code. * Culture fit (30 min): meet both Founders and make sure it's a fit both ways.