Software Engineer, OpenShell

Details

Are you ready to translate groundbreaking AI research into secure, production-grade systems? Want to shape the next generation of AI agent infrastructure? Join us!

At NVIDIA OpenShell, we are building the runtime infrastructure for secure, scalable, production-grade AI agents. As an OpenShell Research Engineer, we will look to you to help bring the latest advances in agentic systems into the runtime, tools, and workflows that enterprise builders rely on.

This role sits at the intersection of research, product, and engineering. We expect you to identify promising methods from academia, industry, open source, and internal NVIDIA research, understand where they matter for OpenShell, validate their impact through hands-on prototypes, benchmarks, and real agent workflows, and help us integrate the best ideas into the product.

Responsibilities

• Track the cutting edge of agentic systems: tool use, planning, memory, evaluation, self-improvement, multi-agent workflows, runtime infrastructure, and agent safety/security.
• Bridge research and product: identify research ideas that can meaningfully improve OpenShell and translate them into concrete product opportunities.
• Benchmark and adapt: reproduce and test promising methods from papers, open-source projects, industry work, and internal NVIDIA research.
• Build rapid prototypes and proof-of-concepts using OpenShell, including agent harnesses, evaluation loops, self-improving workflows, and runtime-native developer experiences.
• Design evaluation and red-team harnesses to measure agent reliability, usefulness, scalability, safety, security, and developer experience.
• Help design secure-by-default workflows for agents operating with tools, code, files, credentials, and enterprise systems.
• Partner across engineering, product, design, research, solutions, and developer-facing teams to move ideas from prototype to product.

Requirements

• 8+ years of professional practical experience in research engineering, software development, or a related technical field.
• MS/PhD in Computer Science, Physics, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• Strong background in turning complex research into reusable products, tools, demos, benchmarks, or production systems at scale.
• Deep experience in several of the following: LLMs, agent harnesses, multimodal generative models, evaluation frameworks, synthetic data generation, post-training, inference infrastructure/optimization, adversarial ML, or agent safety/security.
• Demonstrated ability to drive independent technical investigation: survey relevant work, run experiments, form a clear point of view, and communicate findings clearly.
• Strong product sense and care for UX and AX: tools should be intuitive for developers and ergonomic for agents.
• Focus on real-world impact: convert research into enterprise capabilities, reference implementations, developer workflows, or product improvements.
• Outstanding team orientation and comfort collaborating across research, engineering, product, design, solutions, and developer-facing teams.

Ways to stand out

• Experience with secure agent runtimes, tool sandboxing, capability-based security, or enterprise policy systems.
• Experience with compliance or enterprise governance requirements such as auditability, data retention, access control, SOC2, HIPAA, GDPR, or regulated deployment environments.
• Experience with LLM inference infrastructure, model serving, or inference optimization using tools such as Triton, TensorRT-LLM, vLLM, SGLang, Ray, Kubernetes, or cloud GPU platforms.
• Experience integrating inference backends into agentic systems, including routing across models, tool-aware context management, streaming, structured outputs, retries, monitoring, and cost/performance optimization.
• Experience developing or maintaining open-source software in AI agents, LLM systems, developer tooling, ML infrastructure, model serving, or related areas.

Compensation & Benefits

• Base salary range: 184,000 USD - 287,500 USD (base salary determined by location, experience, and pay of similar positions).
• Eligible for equity and benefits (link to NVIDIA benefits provided in the posting).

Other details

• Applications accepted at least until July 17, 2026. This posting is for an existing vacancy.
• NVIDIA uses AI tools in its recruiting processes.
• NVIDIA is an equal opportunity employer and commits to fostering an inclusive work environment.