Principal Software Engineer, Agent Harness Bridge
About The Position
OpenAI's research training infrastructure powers how our frontier models are trained and evaluated. The Agent Harness Bridge team sits at the boundary between the Codex harness, research infrastructure, and internal agent systems, ensuring the same agentic coding runtime used in product can also support large-scale training workloads. This team owns the integration layer that connects harness capabilities into the training stack. The work is highly cross-functional and high leverage: researchers depend on it to run reliably, platform teams depend on it to evolve cleanly, and failures in this surface can materially affect training velocity and correctness. We're looking for a Principal Software Engineer to lead the architecture and evolution of the Agent Harness Bridge. You'll own a critical interface between research and engineering, building the systems, APIs, and operational patterns that let researchers use agentic coding infrastructure safely and effectively in training environments. This role is ideal for a senior backend or infrastructure engineer with strong technical judgment, product sense for highly technical users, and the ability to drive execution across multiple teams. The highest-leverage work is not novel research; it is building robust infrastructure that accelerates research without compromising engineering quality.
Requirements
- Significant experience building and scaling backend or infrastructure systems in fast-moving environments
- Deep strength in API design, systems design, and engineering fundamentals
- Highly detail-oriented and care deeply about correctness, reliability, and operational quality
- Can work directly with demanding technical users while maintaining strong engineering discipline
- Track record of leading cross-functional technical efforts and creating clarity across organizational boundaries
- Strong product sense and user empathy for internal platforms and developer tooling
- Motivated by enabling researchers and accelerating their work, rather than doing research yourself
- Proficient in Python and have experience with backend platform engineering
Nice To Haves
- Rust experience is a plus
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and evolve the bridge between the Codex harness and research training infrastructure
- Own major integration surfaces end-to-end, from architecture and API design through rollout, operations, and long-term maintenance
- Build reliable, containerized execution systems that can support demanding training workloads at scale
- Partner closely with research, agent, infrastructure, and platform teams to support new training use cases and harness capabilities
- Design clean, stable interfaces and workflows for highly technical internal users who move quickly and expect strong ergonomics
- Prevent one-off workarounds from becoming long-term technical debt by establishing durable abstractions and clear ownership
- Raise the bar for correctness, reliability, operational rigor, and engineering judgment across a critical research-facing system
Benefits
- We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
Education Level
No Education Listed
