Sr/Lead AI Harness Engineer

FICO; United States; On-site; USD 105,000 - 165,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Work-life balance

Employee resource groups

Social events

Job summary

FICO is seeking a Lead Harness Engineer to design and own the environment that steers AI agents toward correct, maintainable outputs. You will build guides, feedback loops, and controls to ensure quality and safety in production-grade engineering.

You will work across a modern stack with linters, CI pipelines, containerized environments, and observability tooling, mentoring juniors and driving architectural excellence in agent-enabled software.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's/Master's in Computer Science or related disciplines.
• Strong software engineering background with experience in large codebases.
• Experience building tooling across a modern stack (linters, CI, containers).
• Hands-on with AI coding agents and understanding where they succeed or fail.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, deploy, and support harness components from problem to production.
• Build feedforward guides and agent instruction files to improve accuracy.
• Create feedback sensors and verification loops to catch issues early.
• Issue steering controls to prevent repeated mistakes and reduce drift.
• Improve observability: track measures like PR velocity and defect escape rate.
• Evaluate stability, scalability, and performance of harness components.
• Mentor junior engineers and share technical expertise.

Skills

Software engineering

AI agents

System architecture

Agent orchestration

Communication

Education

Bachelor's/Master's in Computer Science or related

Tools

CI pipelines

Linters

Static analysis

Containerized build/test

Observability tooling

Job description

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 fulfil 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?

• 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/Careers

FICO 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

FICO powers decisions that help people and businesses around the world prosper. Founded in 1956, FICO has been the trusted backbone of financial decisioning for more than seven decades. We empower businesses worldwide with applied intelligence and advanced analytics to transform complex data into fair, explainable, and actionable decisions — enabling smarter outcomes, stronger customer relationships, and sustainable growth.

FICO clients include more than half of the top 100 banks in the world, more than 600 personal and commercial line insurers in North America and Europe, 400+ retailers and general merchandisers, all of the 100 largest U.S. credit card issuers, and more. FICO is a global leader in analytics software, empowering businesses to make smarter, faster decisions through cutting-edge data science, machine learning, and AI.

Creators of the iconic FICO® Score — the standard in credit decisioning — and recognized in both the Forrester Wave™ and Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for its decision intelligence. FICO delivers a powerful platform built on Applied Intelligence, combining advanced analytics with explainable AI to drive transparency, reduce risk, and enable hyper‑personalized customer experiences at scale. Trusted by organizations across financial services, insurance, payments, and beyond, FICO turns data into decisions that matter.