Principal Software Engineer, Agent Harness Bridge

About the Team

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.

About the Role

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.

In this role, you will

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

You might thrive in this role if you

Have significant experience building and scaling backend or infrastructure systems in fast-moving environments
Bring deep strength in API design, systems design, and engineering fundamentals
Are highly detail-oriented and care deeply about correctness, reliability, and operational quality
Can work directly with demanding technical users while maintaining strong engineering discipline
Have a track record of leading cross-functional technical efforts and creating clarity across organizational boundaries
Bring strong product sense and user empathy for internal platforms and developer tooling
Are motivated by enabling researchers and accelerating their work, rather than doing research yourself
Are proficient in Python and have experience with backend platform engineering; Rust experience is a plus

Location

This role is ideally based in San Francisco due to the close collaboration required with researchers and infrastructure partners.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

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