Senior Software Engineer, Open Harness Engineering

NVIDIA Gruppe; California (MO); On-site; USD 184,000 - 357,000; Full time

Job summary

NVIDIA seeks a senior software engineer to define and evolve the technical approach for evaluating and improving open agent harnesses across frameworks, models, and benchmarks. You will build scalable evaluation systems, diagnose failures from traces and logs, and design experiments to distinguish real harness improvements from noise.

Responsibilities include shipping harness/runtime improvements, contributing to open-source, and collaborating with model, infrastructure, and research teams to

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Applied Math, or related field or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years of hands-on software-engineering experience with production systems and architecture design leadership.
• Expert Python skills and working proficiency in Rust, Go, C++, or TypeScript; able to debug across language boundaries.
• Experience building or extending LLM agents, tool-use loops, model-provider integrations, or evaluation infrastructure.
• Solid understanding of asynchronous execution, subprocesses, containers, sandboxing, callbacks, retries, networking, and distributed compute.
• Experience crafting reproducible experiments, benchmark methodology, performance investigations, or reliability analysis under nondeterministic conditions.
• Record of shipping and maintaining open-source or developer-facing software with testing, API development, documentation, and code reviews.

Responsibilities

• Define and evolve the technical approach for evaluating and improving open agent harnesses across frameworks, models, and benchmark environments.
• Build and operate scalable, reproducible evaluation systems spanning CI, scheduled compute, sandboxed execution, artifact provenance, trace capture, and analysis.
• Diagnose agent failures from traces, logs, tool results, and benchmark artifacts, distinguishing harness, evaluator, environment, inference, and model causes.
• Design controlled experiments and promotion criteria that distinguish genuine harness improvements from noise or model-specific gains.
• Ship harness and runtime improvements, including upstream open-source contributions, detectors, regression tests, and maintainable documentation.
• Partner with Relay, Hermes, model, infrastructure, and research teams to turn recurring optimization needs into reusable runtime, trace, and evaluation capabilities.

Skills

Python

Rust

Go

C++

TypeScript

LLM agents

asynchronous execution

distributed compute

debugging across boundaries

open-source software

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science/AI/Applied Math

Tools

OpenTelemetry

OpenInference

AgentBench

Job description

NVIDIA has been transforming computer graphics, PC gaming, and accelerated computing for more than 25 years. It is a unique legacy of innovation that is fueled by great technology—and amazing people. Today, we’re tapping into the unlimited potential of AI to define the next era of computing. An era in which our GPU acts as the brains of computers, robots, and self-driving cars that can understand the world. Doing what's never been done before takes vision, innovation, and the world's best talent. As an NVIDIAN, you'll be immersed in a diverse, supportive environment where everyone is inspired to do their best work. Come join the team and see how you can make a lasting impact on the world.

What you'll be doing:

• Define and evolve the technical approach for evaluating and improving open agent harnesses across frameworks, models, and benchmark environments.
• Build and operate scalable, reproducible evaluation systems spanning CI, scheduled compute, sandboxed execution, artifact provenance, trace capture, and analysis.
• Diagnose agent failures from traces, logs, tool results, and benchmark artifacts, separating harness, evaluator, environment, inference, and model causes.
• Design controlled experiments and promotion criteria that distinguish genuine harness improvements from noise, benchmark artifacts, or model-specific gains.
• Ship focused harness and runtime improvements, including upstream open-source contributions, detectors, regression tests, and maintainable documentation.
• Partner with Relay, Hermes, model, infrastructure, and research teams to turn recurring optimization needs into reusable runtime, trace, and evaluation capabilities.

What we need to see:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Applied Math, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years of hands-on software-engineering experience, with demonstrated technical ownership of production systems; and architecture design leadership.
• Expert Python skills and working proficiency in Rust, Go, C++, or TypeScript, with the ability to debug systems across language and process boundaries.
• Experience building or extending LLM agents, coding agents, tool-use loops, model-provider integrations, developer tools, or evaluation infrastructure.
• Solid understanding of asynchronous execution, subprocesses, containers, sandboxing, callbacks, retries, networking, and distributed compute.
• Experience crafting reproducible experiments, benchmark methodology, performance investigations, regression gates, or reliability analysis under nondeterministic conditions.
• A record of shipping and maintaining open-source or developer-facing software with sound testing, API development, documentation, and code reviews.

Ways to stand out from the crowd

• Meaningful contributions to open-source coding agents, harnesses, agent runtimes, evaluation frameworks, developer tools, or observability projects.
• Published research, technical writing, patents, or substantive open-source work in autonomous software engineering, agent evaluation, reliability, tool use, or inference efficiency.
• Experience with SWE-bench, Terminal-Bench, AgentBench, or comparable public agent benchmarks.
• Shipped improvements to context management, tool interfaces, retries, sandboxed repository execution, long-running agent loops, or evaluation environments.
• Experience with trace-analysis and observability systems such as OpenTelemetry, OpenInference, structured event pipelines, exporters, or debugging tools.

Widely considered to be one of the technology world’s most desirable employers, NVIDIA offers highly competitive salaries and a comprehensive benefits package. As you plan your future, see what we can offer to you and your family www.nvidiabenefits.com/

Your base salary will be determined based on your location, experience, and the pay of employees in similar positions. The base salary range is 184,000 USD - 287,500 USD for Level 4, and 224,000 USD - 356,500 USD for Level 5.

You will also be eligible for equity and benefits.

Applications for this job will be accepted at least until September 5, 2026.

This posting is for an existing vacancy.

NVIDIA uses AI tools in its recruiting processes.

NVIDIA is committed to fostering an inclusive work environment and proud to be an equal opportunity employer. As we highly value diversity in our current and future employees, we do not discriminate (including in our hiring and promotion practices) on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin , gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status or any other characteristic protected by law.