Fair Isaac Corporation

Sr/Lead AI Harness Engineer

Fair Isaac Corporation$105K — $165K *
US-AnywhereRemote in United States
Information Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Bachelor's/Master's in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent experience.
  • Strong software engineering background with emphasis on architecture and maintainability.
  • Experience developing tools for CI/CD, static analysis, and observability in modern tech stacks.
  • Hands-on experience with AI coding agents like Claude Code or Codex.
  • Familiarity with specification-driven development and context engineering.
  • Systems-focused mindset to improve environments over individual outputs.
  • Ability to discern when to use computational controls versus AI-based evaluations.

Responsibilities

  • Design and develop components of the harness for AI quality control.
  • Build feedforward guides to improve agent performance from the start.
  • Create feedback sensors to catch coding issues before human review.
  • Run the steering loop to prevent recurring mistakes in agent outputs.
  • Contribute to establishing quality criteria and testing procedures.
  • Enhance observability into agent work and key performance metrics.
  • Evaluate performance and compatibility of harness components.

Benefits

  • Inclusive culture reflecting core values of ownership and respect.
  • Opportunities for personal impact and professional development.
  • Competitive compensation and rewards programs.
  • Work-life balance and people-first work environment with social events.
  • Engagement in employee resource groups and community.
Full Job Description
The Opportunity

Come 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 hard part is no longer writing code - agents generate it faster than humans can review it, so the bottleneck shifts to verification and trust. Harness Engineering exists to break that bottleneck: engineering the environment that steers agents toward correct, maintainable, well-architected output so that 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 youll build and own the individual controls that make up that harness, working end-to-end from problem to production.

What Youll Contribute

  • 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 cant 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 the measures that matter - 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.


What Were Seeking

  • Bachelors/Masters in Computer Science or related disciplines, or relevant experience in software architecture, design, development, and testing.
  • Strong software engineering background; youve worked in large codebases and care about architecture, testing, and maintainability.
  • Comfortable building tooling across a modern stack - linters and static analysis, CI pipelines, containerized build/test environments, and instrumentation/observability - and familiar with agent instruction conventions such as AGENTS.md.
  • Hands-on experience with AI coding agents (e.g. Claude Code, Codex, or similar) and a feel for where they succeed and fail.
  • Experience with spec-driven development, context engineering, agent orchestration, fitness functions, and developer-platform work.
  • A systems mindset - youd rather fix the environment than fix one output - and the ability to encode what good looks like into mechanical, repeatable rules.
  • Judgement about when to reach for deterministic, computational controls (type checkers, linters, structural/architecture-fitness tests) versus inferential, LLM-based ones (AI code review, LLM-as-judge) - and an understanding of the cost, speed, and reliability trade-offs between them.
  • Clear communicator; able to articulate design with architects and discuss strategy and requirements with teams.


Our Offer to You
  • An inclusive culture strongly reflecting our core values: Act Like an Owner, Delight Our Customers and Earn the Respect of Others.
  • The opportunity to make an impact and develop professionally by leveraging your unique strengths and participating in valuable learning experiences.
  • Highly competitive compensation, benefits and rewards programs that encourage you to bring your best every day and be recognized for doing so.
  • An engaging, people-first work environment offering work/life balance, employee resource groups, and social events to promote interaction and camaraderie.
  • The targeted base pay range for this role is: $105,000 to $165,000 with this range reflecting differences in candidate knowledge, skills and experience.

About Fair Isaac Corporation

Fair Isaac Corporation, also known as FICO, is a data analytics company that provides credit scoring services and decision management solutions to businesses in various industries. The company was founded in 1956 and is headquartered in San Jose, California. FICO's products and services are used by banks, credit card companies, insurance companies, retailers, and other businesses to make data-driven decisions about credit risk, fraud detection, customer acquisition, and more. The company is committed to using advanced analytics and artificial intelligence to help businesses make better decisions and improve their bottom line.
Learn more about Fair Isaac Corporation
Size
3,460 employees
Market Cap
$15.2 billion
Industry
Net Income
$267.9 million
Founded
1956
5 Year Trend
+8.1%
Revenue
$1.3 billion
NASDAQ

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