What are the responsibilities and job description for the Senior Software Engineer - Applied AI position at Hero?
We are a San Francisco based startup with an ambitious goal of disrupting the $500B public safety space. We have moved rapidly from vision to execution: our MVP is live in production, with paying customers and multiple departments currently relying on our platform for daily operations. Founded by industry veterans from Amazon, Airbnb and Google with a track record of bringing big ideas to life, we are building a vertically integrated platform that blends hardware sensors, software algorithms and predictive AI models to transform public safety from a labor-driven service to a product based solution. We are seed funded by some of the world's best investors and entrepreneurs. If you deeply care about tech-for-good, have a track record of solving real-world problems at scale and have always been at the cutting edge of technical innovation, let’s talk!
What You'll Do
Mission & Mindset
What You'll Do
- AI Innovation: Leverage advancements in AI to create solutions using edge/cloud reasoning models, computer vision and automation algorithms that improve public safety outcomes.
- Architect & Implement: Design high-availability, AI-enabled web and mobile applications for our vertically integrated platform catering to public safety use cases like incident management, dispatch, investigations and real-time intelligence.
- Production Excellence: Deploy applications to our cloud-native infrastructure, transitioning new ideas from prototype to production while ensuring zero-downtime, high reliability and high performance for our customers
- Security & Compliance: Proactively identify and remediate vulnerabilities/threat vectors to ensure our production environment meets the rigorous compliance standards (CJIS, FEDRAMP) for law enforcement systems.
- Technical Leadership: Bring new ideas to the table, maintain a high-quality bar for our platform, lead technical deep-dives and promote best practices to level up the engineering team. Collaborate with designers, PMs and founders to influence the overall product direction.
Mission & Mindset
- Mission Driven: You’re passionate about giving back to the community and believe there’s more to life than optimizing ad revenue, discretionary purchases or social media filters.
- 10x Mentality: You’re an innovator and a self-starter who doesn't wait for permission to make things happen.
- Startup Ready: You thrive in the ambiguity and intensity that comes with an early stage, seed-funded startup.
- CS Fundamentals: Solid grasp of data structures, algorithms, operating systems, databases and networking.
- Infrastructure: Strong knowledge of AWS, PostgreSQL, gRPC, Docker and service-oriented architectures.
- Programming: Deep expertise in object oriented design concepts and modern languages like Python and Golang.
- AI Fundamentals: Solid grasp of machine learning concepts like neural networks, classification, reasoning, tokenization and RAG.
- Applied AI: Experience using LLMs, VLMs, Generative AI, Multimodal Models, GPU pipelines and Computer Vision to implement novel solutions.
- AI Development: Familiarity with AI development platforms like PyTorch, Hugging Face, OpenCV, DeepStream, MediaMTX and TensorRT.
- Next-Gen Tooling: Proficiency in AI-augmented development platforms like Claude Code, Cursor, Graphite and Codex.
- Education: Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or a related field (Master’s equivalent to 1 year of experience)
- Industry: 6–10 years of professional software engineering experience (excluding internships)
- Specialization: At least 3 years of industry experience specifically with Machine Learning, Computer Vision or applied AI systems is preferred.