Staff Software Engineer, Agent Harnessing

About this role

Staff Software Engineer, Agent Harnessing @ Scout AI

Staff Software Engineer, Agent Harnessing

Location

Sunnyvale, CA; Remote

Employment Type

Full time

Location Type

Remote

Department

Engineering

Compensation

• $230K – $380K • Offers Equity

OverviewApplication

The future of defense will be decided by those who field intelligent machines at scale. At Scout AI, we’re developing Fury, the first robotic foundation model for defense, to give U.S. forces overwhelming, adaptable, and autonomous power across every domain. Fury enables human operators to command fleets of robots through natural language, and empowers those machines to sense, decide, and act together as one. This mission will ask everything of us: urgency, precision, and relentless work.

The Role

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Agent Harnessing team, you will build the core architecture that allows AI agents to interact with and control complex, real-world physical systems. This spans agent orchestration, tool integration, low-latency communication layers, and execution environments designed as a platform that Scout AI engineers can extend and depend on.

Responsibilities

• Designing and advancing the agent harness (agent loop, tools, prompts, execution environment, capabilities) used across Scout AI's agentic stack
• Integrating fullstack software with physical hardware systems and AI agents, ensuring robust, low-latency communication across complex pipelines
• Building simulation environments and video-game-like frameworks that allow agents to be tested and trained before physical deployment
• Owning the connectors between AI models and real-world systems, the layer that translates model output into physical action
• Fine-tune frontier AI models and build the data acquisition pipelines that feed the training infrastructure powering our agents
• Work shoulder-to-shoulder with warfighters to turn capability requests into production-ready agentic systems

Qualification

• 10+ years of full-stack engineering experience (startup or high-ownership environment preferred)
• You have built complex agentic products or infrastructure—agent loops, orchestration systems, tool-use frameworks. You have strong opinions on model and agent behavior
• You are a systems-oriented fullstack engineer with hands-on experience integrating software with physical hardware or low-level systems
• You have exposure to simulation environments, game engines (Unreal, Unity, Isaac Sim), or robotics middleware (ROS/ROS2)
• You have strong SWE fundamentals—architecture, distributed systems, real-time pipelines—and love shipping production systems
• Must be a U.S. Person due to required access to U.S. export controlled information or facilities
• Passion about defense of the United States and its allies
• May be expected to obtain and hold a U.S. Top Secret security clearance

Why Join Scout

• Work on the world’s most important frontier, ensuring U.S. and allied dominance in the age of intelligent machines
• Be a core part of a team building the first defense-specific robotic foundation model
• Collaborate with some of the top engineers in autonomy, AI, and national security
• See your work deployed on real systems
• Help define the future of intelligent defense systems
• Backed by Draper Associates, Booz Allen Ventures, and other top investors

Benefits

• Competitive cash compensation
• Meaningful equity
• Premium medical, dental, and vision plans with $0 paycheck contribution
• Competitive PTO and company holiday calendar
• Catered lunch daily and fully stocked kitchen
• EV charging
• Relocation assistance (depending on role eligibility)