Principal Software Engineer, Agent Policy Fabric

NVIDIA•Us, CA

About The Position

NVIDIA is seeking a Principal Software Engineer, Agent Policy Fabric (APF) Core Platform, to join the Cloud Engineering & Services team. This role involves maturing the APF v0 proof-of-life into a robust core platform for governed agent action. The engineer will be instrumental in building the foundations for signed policy, Runtime Policy Verifier, projection, conformance, and failure modes for future APF deployments. The team is focused on building an enterprise governance layer for agentic systems, including signed policy, runtime verification, policy projection, credential mediation, detector verdict handling, and common audit across runtime substrates and enterprise integrations.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree (or equivalent experience) with 15+ years of industry experience in systems software, security engineering, distributed systems, or policy infrastructure.
Strong programming skills in Rust, Go, C++, or Python.
Experience designing production services, APIs, schemas, policy engines, authorization systems, or signed artifact pipelines.
Linux systems, IPC or service-to-service APIs, protobuf/gRPC or equivalent wire formats, CI, test automation, release engineering, and cloud or enterprise deployment environments.
Practical experience with authorization, cryptographic signatures, trust roots, revocation, subject binding, rollback protection, secure-by-default failure handling, and zero-trust architecture patterns.
Ability to write streamlined technical specifications, align multiple engineering owners, defend bounded claims, and turn working-draft architecture into buildable interfaces without over-scoping the runtime.

Nice To Haves

Experience with OPA/Rego, Cedar, Zanzibar-style authorization, policy compilers, sandbox policy, or runtime enforcement systems.
Familiarity with agent frameworks, tool-call governance, sandboxed execution, OpenShell-like runtime substrates, MCP-style tool routing, or credential isolation for agents.
Experience with Sigstore, TUF, in-toto, HSM-backed signing, package provenance, signed configuration, or enterprise trust-root distribution.
Experience using property testing, model checking, symbolic execution, red-team findings, or bounded verification to constrain security claims.
Experience contributing to RFCs in identity, supply-chain, or policy spaces (IETF, OpenID Foundation, FIDO Alliance, CNCF, NIST).

Responsibilities

Own APF Core Services: Build and harden the Runtime Policy Verifier, signed policy bundle verification, trust-root handling, freshness, rollback protection, subject binding to attested runtime context, revocation checks, and authorization APIs used by APF-compatible enforcement points.
Design Policy Projection: Implement deterministic projections from the canonical APF policy into OpenShell-native runtime policy, adapter constraints, credential constraints, audit requirements, and model-visible tool hints, while preserving the atomic projection-admission contract.
Build Conformance and Verification: Create golden fixtures, compatibility tests, negative tests, fuzz/property tests, and conformance suites that prove APF-compatible runtimes and adapters honor the same contract.
Collaborate with Runtime Owners: Engage alongside OpenShell and Infrastructure engineers on public runtime interfaces for projection consumption, runtime context attestation, approved adapter paths, direct egress verification, and admission/rejection semantics. Land the Runtime integration surfaces.
Own the cross-team work with OpenShell and other runtime owners to land public substrate interfaces APF composes against — runtime-context attestation, approved adapter path declaration, projection acceptance and rejection semantics, quarantine, and stop-session hooks. Land each as a public RFC or PR.
Drive Architecture Maturity: Define versioning, schema compatibility, latency budgets, availability behavior, fail-closed defaults, last-known-good policy handling, and engineering review artifacts for Product Security, Fleet, Identity, and partner teams. Evolve technical specifications.
Write specifications, defend bounded claims in security and architecture reviews, drive open-decision resolution, and turn working-draft contracts into engineering artifacts that Product Security, Fleet, Identity, and partner runtimes can adopt.