Sr/Lead AI Harness Engineer

FICO; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 105,000 - 165,000; Full time

Job summary

FICO is seeking a Sr/Lead AI Harness Engineer to design, develop and own the harness components that steer AI model outputs toward reliable, producible results. This hands-on role spans problem to production and emphasizes systems and tooling over writing application code.

You'll build guides, feedback sensors, and steering loops, contribute to quality gates, observability, and performance benchmarks, and mentor junior engineers in a fast-moving environment.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science or related, or equivalent experience.
• Strong software engineering background with large codebases and maintainability focus.
• Experience with AI coding agents and spec-driven development recommended.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, deploy, and support harness components that turn model capability into production-grade engineering.
• Build guides, feedback sensors, and steering loops to prevent repeated errors.
• Contribute to quality gates, releases, and observability of agent work.
• Mentor junior engineers and share expertise across the team.

Skills

Software architecture

CI/CD tooling

AI coding agents

Context engineering

Systems mindset

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related

Master's degree in Computer Science or related

Tools

CI pipelines

Containerized environments

Static analysis tools

Linters

Job description

## Sr/Lead AI Harness EngineerApplylocations: Work from Home, United Statestime type: Full timeposted on: Posted Todayjob requisition id: 32157**FICO (NYSE: FICO)** is a leading global analytics software company, helping businesses in 100+ countries make better decisions. Join our world-class team today and fulfill your career potential!**The Opportunity**Come join our engineering team in a hands-on technical role at the heart of a new discipline: Harness Engineering. As AI coding agents take on more of the software lifecycle, the hard part is no longer writing code — agents generate it faster than humans can review it, so the bottleneck shifts to verification and trust. Harness Engineering exists to break that bottleneck: engineering the environment that steers agents toward correct, maintainable, well-architected output so that quality is enforced by the system, not re-audited by a person on every change. We call that environment the *harness* (**Agent = Model + Harness**). As a Lead Harness Engineer you'll build and own the individual controls that make up that harness, working end-to-end from problem to production. **What You’ll Contribute*** Design, develop, deploy, and support components of the harness — the guides, feedback loops, guardrails, and shared context that turn raw model capability into production-grade engineering. This is a hands-on role focused on systems and leverage, not hand-writing application code.* Build feedforward guides — agent instruction files, reusable skills, architectural rules, reference docs, and codemods — that help agents get it right the first time.* Build feedback sensors — custom linters, static analysis, structural and architecture-fitness tests, verification loops, and LLM-as-judge reviewers — that catch issues before they reach human reviewers.* Run the steering loop — when an agent repeats a mistake, engineer a control so it can't happen again — and help keep repository knowledge (docs, specs, context) legible to agents, fighting drift.* Contribute to quality gating and release criteria, and to LLM testing that ensures AI-generated output meets quality and safety thresholds.* Help improve observability into agent work and track the measures that matter — cost per merged PR, time-to-merge for agent-assisted PRs, review velocity relative to PR size, defect escape rate, and agent-PR survival rate.* Evaluate the stability, compatibility, scalability, interoperability, and performance of harness components.* Continually learn new techniques in agent-augmented engineering and serve as a source of technical expertise and mentor to junior team members.**What We’re Seeking*** Bachelor's/Master's in Computer Science or related disciplines, or relevant experience in software architecture, design, development, and testing.* Strong software engineering background; you've worked in large codebases and care about architecture, testing, and maintainability.* Comfortable building tooling across a modern stack — linters and static analysis, CI pipelines, containerized build/test environments, and instrumentation/observability — and familiar with agent instruction conventions such as AGENTS.md.* Hands-on experience with AI coding agents (e.g. Claude Code, Codex, or similar) and a feel for where they succeed and fail.* Experience with spec-driven development, context engineering, agent orchestration, fitness functions, and developer-platform work.* A systems mindset — you'd rather fix the environment than fix one output — and the ability to encode \"what good looks like\" into mechanical, repeatable rules.* Judgement about when to reach for deterministic, computational controls (type checkers, linters, structural/architecture-fitness tests) versus inferential, LLM-based ones (AI code review, LLM-as-judge) — and an understanding of the cost, speed, and reliability trade-offs between them.* Clear communicator; able to articulate design with architects and discuss strategy and requirements with teams.**Our Offer to You*** An inclusive culture strongly reflecting our core values: Act Like an Owner, Delight Our Customers and Earn the Respect of Others.* The opportunity to make an impact and develop professionally by leveraging your unique strengths and participating in valuable learning experiences.* Highly competitive compensation, benefits and rewards programs that encourage you to bring your best every day and be recognized for doing so.* An engaging, people-first work environment offering work/life balance, employee resource groups, and social events to promote interaction and camaraderie.* The targeted base pay range for this role is: $105,000 to $165,000 with this range reflecting differences in candidate knowledge, skills and experience.**Why Make a Move to FICO?**At FICO, you can develop your career with a leading organization in one of the fastest-growing fields in technology today – Big Data analytics. You’ll play a part in our commitment to help businesses use data to improve every choice they make, using advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, optimization, and much more.FICO makes a real difference in the way businesses operate worldwide:• Credit Scoring — FICO Scores are used by 90 of the top 100 US lenders.• Fraud Detection and Security — 4 billion payment cards globally are protected by FICO fraud systems.• Lending — 3/4 of US mortgages are approved using the FICO Score.Global trends toward digital transformation have created tremendous demand for FICO’s solutions, placing us among the world’s top 100 software companies by revenue. We help many of the world’s largest banks, insurers, retailers, telecommunications providers and other firms reach a new level of success. Our success is dependent on really talented people – just like you – who thrive on the collaboration and innovation that’s nurtured by a diverse and inclusive environment. We’ll provide the support you need, while ensuring you have the freedom to develop your skills and grow your career. Join FICO and help change the way business thinks!Learn more about how you can fulfil your potential at www.fico.com/CareersFICO promotes a culture of inclusion and seeks to attract a diverse set of candidates for each job opportunity. We are an equal employment opportunity employer and we’re proud to offer employment and advancement opportunities to all candidates without regard to race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, pregnancy, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. Research has shown that women and candidates from underrepresented communities may not apply for an opportunity if they don’t meet all stated qualifications. While our qualifications are clearly related to role success, each candidate’s profile is unique and strengths in certain skill and/or experience areas can be equally effective. If you believe you have many, but not necessarily all, of the stated qualifications we encourage you to apply.Information submitted with your application is subject to the FICO Privacy policy at https://www.fico.com/en/privacy-policy