Principal Software Engineer, Agent Policy Fabric

Details

NVIDIA Cloud Engineering & Services is building an enterprise governance layer for agentic systems: signed policy, runtime verification, policy projection, credential mediation, detector verdict handling, and common audit across runtime substrates and enterprise integrations. This role is to mature an APF v0 proof-of-life into a robust core platform for governed agent action, including signed policy, Runtime Policy Verifier, projection, conformance, and failure mode handling for APF deployments.

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 cross-team work 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 — and publish 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 produce 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 adopable by Product Security, Fleet, Identity, and partner runtimes.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree (or equivalent experience) with 15+ years of industry experience in systems software, security engineering, distributed systems, or policy infrastructure.
• Technical Core: strong programming skills in Rust, Go, C++, or Python; experience designing production services, APIs, schemas, policy engines, authorization systems, or signed artifact pipelines.
• Infrastructure Familiarity: 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.
• Security Engineering: practical experience with authorization, cryptographic signatures, trust roots, revocation, subject binding, rollback protection, secure-by-default failure handling, and zero-trust architecture patterns.
• Architecture Leadership: 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.

Ways to Stand Out

• Runtime Policy Systems: experience with OPA/Rego, Cedar, Zanzibar-style authorization, policy compilers, sandbox policy, or runtime enforcement systems.
• Agent Runtime Security: familiarity with agent frameworks, tool-call governance, sandboxed execution, OpenShell-like runtime substrates, MCP-style tool routing, or credential isolation for agents.
• Supply Chain and Signing: experience with Sigstore, TUF, in-toto, HSM-backed signing, package provenance, signed configuration, or enterprise trust-root distribution.
• Formal or Adversarial Verification: experience using property testing, model checking, symbolic execution, red-team findings, or bounded verification to constrain security claims.
• Standards engagement: experience contributing to RFCs in identity, supply-chain, or policy spaces (IETF, OpenID Foundation, FIDO Alliance, CNCF, NIST).

Compensation and Benefits

• Base salary range: 272,000 USD - 431,250 USD (final base determined by location, experience, and pay of employees in similar positions).
• Eligible for equity and NVIDIA benefits (link to NVIDIA benefits referenced in original posting).

Company & Application

• Applications for this job will be accepted at least until June 26, 2026.
• This posting is for an existing vacancy.
• NVIDIA uses AI tools in its recruiting processes and is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion.