Principal Software Engineer, Agent Harness Bridge

United States Digital Space LLC; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

The company is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead the architecture and evolution of the Agent Harness Bridge, owning a critical interface between research and engineering for agentic coding infrastructure. You will guide system design, APIs, and operational patterns enabling researchers to run training workloads safely and efficiently.

Ideal candidates bring senior backend or infrastructure expertise, strong judgment, and the ability to drive cross‑team execution while delivering

Qualifications

• Experience in designing robust APIs and scalable systems.
• Strong grounding in software architecture and engineering fundamentals.
• Proficiency in Python; backend platform engineering experience preferred.
• Rust knowledge is a plus for performance-critical components.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and evolve the bridge between the Codex harness and research training infrastructure.
• Own major integration surfaces end-to-end, from architecture and API design through rollout and maintenance.
• Build reliable, containerized execution systems that can scale for demanding training workloads.
• Partner with research, agent, infrastructure, and platform teams to support new training use cases and harness capabilities.
• Design clean, stable interfaces and workflows for highly technical internal users.
• Prevent one‑off workarounds from becoming long‑term debt by establishing durable abstractions and clear ownership.
• Raise the bar for correctness, reliability, operational rigor, and engineering judgment across a critical research‑facing system.

Skills

API design

Systems design

Python

Backend platform engineering

Rust

Job description

About the Team

OpenAI's research training infrastructure powers how our frontier models are trained and evaluated. The Agent Harness Bridge team sits at the boundary between the Codex harness, research infrastructure, and internal agent systems, ensuring the same agentic coding runtime used in product can also support large-scale training workloads.

This team owns the integration layer that connects harness capabilities into the training stack. The work is highly cross‑functional and high leverage: researchers depend on it to run reliably, platform teams depend on it to evolve cleanly, and failures in this surface can materially affect training velocity and correctness.

About the Role

We're looking for a Principal Software Engineer to lead the architecture and evolution of the Agent Harness Bridge. You'll own a critical interface between research and engineering, building the systems, APIs, and operational patterns that let researchers use agentic coding infrastructure safely and effectively in training environments.

This role is ideal for a senior backend or infrastructure engineer with strong technical judgment, product sense for highly technical users, and the ability to drive execution across multiple teams. The highest‑leverage work is not novel research; it is building robust infrastructure that accelerates research without compromising engineering quality.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and evolve the bridge between the Codex harness and research training infrastructure.
• Own major integration surfaces end‑to‑end, from architecture and API design through rollout, operations, and long‑term maintenance.
• Build reliable, containerized execution systems that can support demanding training workloads at scale.
• Partner closely with research, agent, infrastructure, and platform teams to support new training use cases and harness capabilities.
• Design clean, stable interfaces and workflows for highly technical internal users who move quickly and expect strong ergonomics.
• Prevent one‑off workarounds from becoming long‑term technical debt by establishing durable abstractions and clear ownership.
• Raise the bar for correctness, reliability, operational rigor, and engineering judgment across a critical research‑facing system.

Qualifications

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have significant experience building and scaling backend or infrastructure systems in fast‑moving environments.
• Bring deep strength in API design, systems design, and engineering fundamentals.
• Are highly detail‑oriented and care deeply about correctness, reliability, and operational quality.
• Can work directly with demanding technical users while maintaining strong engineering discipline.
• Have a track record of leading cross‑functional technical efforts and creating clarity across organizational boundaries.
• Bring strong product sense and user empathy for internal platforms and developer tooling.
• Are motivated by enabling researchers and accelerating their work, rather than doing research yourself.
• Are proficient in Python and have experience with backend platform engineering; Rust experience is a plus.

Location

This role is ideally based in San Francisco due to the close collaboration required with researchers and infrastructure partners.

About the Company

the company is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general‑purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.

Equal Opportunity & Legal Notice

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information, please see the company’s affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law and include ... (details omitted for brevity).

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

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At the company, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.