Level

NVIDIA

Agent Evaluation and Self-Improvement Engineer

NVIDIA is hiring an Agent Evaluation and Self-Improvement Engineer in Santa Clara, United States. It pays $224k-$357k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Level.

Level's read on this job

  • Builds AI ●●●● is how Level rates this role: the job is building AI systems.
  • Tools and skills the posting cites include AI agents.
  • Level files it as a senior role.
  • Level lists 2,700+ other open roles at NVIDIA.
  • The role was posted in the last few days.

AI in this role

ai-agents

Autonomous agents now do real work across NVIDIA, and every piece underneath them keeps changing: models, harnesses, tools, skills, and plugins. Evaluation is how a team knows whether a change made an agent better or quietly made it worse. We're looking for a principal engineer to set evaluation strategy at every layer, from individual skills and MCP servers to whole agents and products, and to design how agents use those results to improve themselves.


Agents can already rewrite the skills and plugins they run on, then test whether the change helped. Making that loop trustworthy is the hard part. What does it take for an agent to get better on its own, and prove the improvement is real? We're building a system that answers that question for every agent at NVIDIA. Come build it with us!


What you'll be doing:

  • Build evaluation that works the same across harnesses, with automated checks on every change that catch regressions before users do.
  • Mine production traces for failures, new usage patterns, missing skills and tools, cost and latency hot spots, and successful runs. Turn them into eval cases and improvement signals.
  • Evaluate the eval datasets themselves: coverage of real usage, duplicate cases, and how closely they match production.
  • Build the self-improvement loop for evolving harnesses: agents propose changes to their own skills, plugins, and harness configuration, and sandboxed evals test each one. Only measurable gains ship, with human sign-off and limits agents can't change.
  • Create realistic enterprise environments: sandboxed replicas of issue trackers, code repositories, chat, and internal APIs, filled with synthetic or anonymized data, where agents safely run long, end-to-end tasks.
  • Measure multi-agent swarms as a team: how agents split work, whether handoffs succeed, and whether permissions hold at every hop. Record how long each task takes and how many tokens it uses.
  • Keep evals honest: calibrate model and agent judges against human labels. Catch agents that cheat, such as working backward from expected answers or reaching data and tools they shouldn't access. We work closely with product, platform, and hardware teams throughout NVIDIA, and we help shape open evaluation standards and benchmarks across the industry.

What we need to see:

  • BS or MS in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience)
  • 12+ years building large-scale systems, including evaluation systems for ML or agents and the data pipelines that feed them
  • Hands-on experience building and evaluating agents on an open or closed agent harness
  • Solid grounding in experiment design: statistical significance, variance across repeated runs, and A/B testing
  • Experience setting technical direction across teams as a senior individual contributor
  • Proficiency in Python, Go, Rust, or similar

Ways to stand out from the crowd:

  • Built self-improving or self-evolving agent systems that get better from their own eval results
  • Shipped an agent benchmark, eval framework, or simulated test environment adopted by other teams
  • Detected reward hacking or eval gaming, or built oversight for systems that modify themselves
  • Built domain evaluations, such as for chip design or hardware verification

Your base salary will be determined based on your location, experience, and the pay of employees in similar positions. The base salary range is 224,000 USD - 356,500 USD for Level 5, and 272,000 USD - 431,250 USD for Level 6.

You will also be eligible for equity and benefits.

Applications for this job will be accepted at least until October 20, 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.

How we rate this

Agent Evaluation and Self-Improvement Engineer at NVIDIA rates 95 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Open the description and count.

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

AI agents

Questions you could be asked

  1. How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
  2. How would you decide a model or AI system is ready to ship?
  3. Tell me about a time a model underperformed in production. How did you find out, and what did you change?

Adapt your resume

  • List these exact terms on your resume: AI agents. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
  • Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
  • Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.

Want an expert to read your CV for this job?

Free. Send your CV and the role you want next. We reply by email within 2 to 4 business days.

Get new software engineering jobs (Builds AI ●●●●) by email

One email a week with the new software engineering jobs (Builds AI ●●●●), each rated for how much AI is in the work. No recruiter spam, unsubscribe in one click.

Free. One email a week. Unsubscribe in one click.

Similar roles

Software Engineering roles that build AI, at other companies.

What kind of AI work fits you?

Answer 12 practical questions in about three minutes. Get a simple profile, the work it points to, and live roles to explore next.

Find my next step

More jobs at NVIDIA

Related searches

Same AI level

Jobs by city