Senior Software Engineer, Open Harness Engineering
NVIDIA is hiring a Senior Software Engineer, Open Harness Engineering for a remote role open to applicants in United States. It pays $184k-$288k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on NVIDIA.
Level's read on this job
- Level rates this software engineer role Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
- Pay on this posting starts 10% higher than the typical software engineer posting on Level.
- This is listed as a remote role.
- The posting mentions AI agents among its tools and skills.
- NVIDIA has 2,700+ other open roles on Level.
AI in this role
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 October 25, 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
Senior Software Engineer, Open Harness Engineering at NVIDIA rates 91 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.
Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Also common in software engineer jobs at this level
Pay
- This job starts at
- $184k
- Typical software engineer job
- $167k
This posting starts 10% above the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs
Questions you could be asked
- How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
- How would you decide a model or AI system is ready to ship?
- 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.
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