Senior Software Engineer, Open Harness Engineering

Nvidia Corporation in; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 184,000 - 357,000; Full time

Job summary

NVIDIA in Santa Clara, CA is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to help build core libraries, evaluation systems, and reusable harness capabilities for open-agent work. You will work hands-on across open-source agent harnesses, sandboxed execution, and model-provider infrastructure to improve agent safety, speed, and reliability.

The role requires 8+ years of software engineering, expert Python, and proficiency in Rust/Go/C++/TypeScript, plus experience with distributed systems, asynchronous

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in CS, AI, Applied Math, or related field, or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years of hands-on software-engineering experience and architecture leadership.
• Expert Python skills; working proficiency in Rust, Go, C++, or TypeScript.
• Experience building/open-source agent harnesses, tooling, or evaluation infra.
• Solid knowledge of asynchronous execution, containers, sandboxing, networking, and distributed compute.
• Experience crafting reproducible experiments and reliability analysis.
• Shipping open-source or developer-facing software with testing and docs.

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, 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.

Skills

Python

Rust

Go

C++

TypeScript

Open-source

Agent harnesses

Distributed systems

Asynchronous execution

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

OpenTelemetry

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

Senior Software Engineer, Open Harness Engineering (Finance)

NVIDIA has been transforming computer graphics, PC gaming, and accelerated computing for more than 25 years. It's a unique legacy of innovation that's 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.

Are you excited about open-source software, developer tools, and the future of agentic applications? We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help build the core libraries, evaluation systems, and reusable harness capabilities that make AI agents safer, faster, and easier for developers to trust. In this role, you will work hands-on across open-source agent harnesses, sandboxed execution, model-provider infrastructure, and agent benchmarks to help improve the next generation of agents. You will turn agent-evaluation evidence into real improvements: diagnosing failures, contributing upstream, and proving quality, reliability, cost, and latency gains across models. Join our creative engineering team building foundational technology for the future wave of autonomous software systems!

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.