Sr/Lead AI Harness Engineer

FICO (NYSE: FICO) is a leading global analytics software company, helping businesses in 100+ countries make better decisions.

About the role

Join our engineering team in a hands-on technical role at the heart of a new discipline: Harness Engineering. As AI coding agents take on more of the software lifecycle, the bottleneck shifts to verification and trust. Harness Engineering exists to break that bottleneck by engineering the environment that steers agents toward correct, maintainable, well-architected output—so quality is enforced by the system, not re-audited by a person on every change. We call that environment the harness (Agent = Model + Harness). As a Lead Harness Engineer, you'll build and own the individual controls that make up that harness, working end-to-end from problem to production.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, deploy, and support components of the harness—the guides, feedback loops, guardrails, and shared context that turn raw model capability into production-grade engineering. This is a hands-on role focused on systems and leverage, not hand-writing application code.
• Build feedforward guides: agent instruction files, reusable skills, architectural rules, reference docs, and codemods that help agents get it right the first time.
• Build feedback sensors: custom linters, static analysis, structural and architecture-fitness tests, verification loops, and LLM-as-judge reviewers that catch issues before they reach human reviewers.
• Run the steering loop: when an agent repeats a mistake, engineer a control so it can't happen again and help keep repository knowledge (docs, specs, context) legible to agents, fighting drift.
• Contribute to quality gating and release criteria, and to LLM testing that ensures AI-generated output meets quality and safety thresholds.
• Help improve observability into agent work and track key measures: cost per merged PR, time-to-merge for agent-assisted PRs, review velocity relative to PR size, defect escape rate, and agent-PR survival rate.
• Evaluate the stability, compatibility, scalability, interoperability, and performance of harness components.
• Continually learn new techniques in agent-augmented engineering and serve as a source of technical expertise and mentor to junior team members.

Requirements

• Bachelor's/Master's in Computer Science or related disciplines, or relevant experience in software architecture, design, development, and testing.
• Strong software engineering background; experience working in large codebases with a focus on architecture, testing, and maintainability.
• Comfortable building tooling across a modern stack: linters and static analysis, CI pipelines, containerized build/test environments, and instrumentation/observability.
• Familiarity with agent instruction conventions such as AGENTS.md.
• Hands-on experience with AI coding agents (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, or similar) and an understanding of their strengths and limitations.
• Experience with spec-driven development, context engineering, agent orchestration, fitness functions, and developer-platform work.
• A systems mindset: preferring to fix the environment rather than individual outputs, and the ability to encode "what good looks like" into mechanical, repeatable rules.
• Judgment about when to use deterministic controls (type checkers, linters, structural/architecture-fitness tests) versus inferential, LLM-based ones (AI code review, LLM-as-judge), including understanding cost, speed, and reliability trade-offs.
• Clear communicator; able to articulate design with architects and discuss strategy and requirements with teams.

Benefits

• An inclusive culture reflecting core values: Act Like an Owner, Delight Our Customers, and Earn the Respect of Others.
• Opportunities for professional growth through impactful work and learning experiences.
• Highly competitive compensation, benefits, and rewards programs.
• Work/life balance, employee resource groups, and social events to promote interaction and camaraderie.

Pay

The targeted base pay range for this role is $105,000 to $165,000, reflecting differences in candidate knowledge, skills, and experience.

About FICO

FICO is a leading organization in Big Data analytics, helping businesses worldwide improve decision-making using AI, machine learning, and optimization. Our solutions impact key areas:

• Credit Scoring: FICO Scores are used by 90 of the top 100 US lenders.
• Fraud Detection and Security: 4 billion payment cards globally are protected by FICO fraud systems.
• Lending: 3/4 of US mortgages are approved using the FICO Score.

We serve many of the world’s largest banks, insurers, retailers, and telecommunications providers. Our success depends on talented individuals who thrive in a collaborative, innovative, and diverse environment. We provide support and freedom to develop skills and grow your career.