Director - Harness Engineering

Role Description

Come join our engineering organisation to build the discipline that lets AI coding agents do reliable work at scale. As 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.

This is a hands-on leadership role: you will personally design and build harness components while leading and growing a regional team of harness engineers, and setting the quality bar for AI-assisted engineering across the organisation.

What You’ll Contribute

• Personally design, build, and evolve the harness - the guides, feedback loops, guardrails, and shared context that turn raw model capability into production-grade engineering.
• Build and maintain feedforward guides (agent instruction files, reusable skills, architectural rules, reference docs, and codemods).
• Build feedback sensors - custom linters, structural and architecture-fitness tests, verification loops, and LLM-as-judge reviewers.
• Own AI governance for your region: define authority boundaries for what agents may merge unaided.
• Define and own cross-organizational QA and quality-gating standards.
• Run the steering loop at scale - ensure a control is engineered so mistakes cannot happen again.
• Decide where each control runs in the path to production.
• Establish observability into agent work and own the measures that matter.
• Manage, coach, and grow a geographically distributed team of harness engineers.
• Work closely with other engineering leaders and product management.
• Demonstrate expertise through internal enablement, presentations, and thought leadership.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's/Master's in Computer Science or related discipline, or relevant commercial experience in software architecture, design, development, and testing.
• Strong software engineering background with experience in large, complex codebases.
• Hands-on experience with AI coding agents (e.g. Claude Code, Codex, or similar).
• Experience building engineering tooling across a modern stack.
• Experience with spec-driven development, context engineering, agent orchestration, fitness functions, and developer-platform work.
• A systems mindset - ability to encode "what good looks like" into mechanical, repeatable rules.
• Judgement about when to reach for deterministic versus inferential controls.
• Demonstrated experience owning AI governance and cross-organisational quality standards.
• Working knowledge of the security surface unique to autonomous agents.
• Strong experience managing geographically distributed, high-performing engineering teams.
• Excellent communication skills to articulate design, strategy, and standards across teams.

Benefits

• An inclusive culture strongly reflecting our core values.
• The opportunity to make an impact and develop professionally.
• Highly competitive compensation, benefits, and rewards programs.
• An engaging, people-first work environment offering work/life balance.

Company Description

At FICO, you can develop your career with a leading organization in one of the fastest-growing fields in technology today – Big Data analytics. You’ll play a part in our commitment to help businesses use data to improve every choice they make, using advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, optimization, and much more.

• FICO® Scores are used by 90 of the top 100 US lenders.
• 4 billion payment cards globally are protected by FICO fraud systems.
• 3/4 of US mortgages are approved using the FICO Score.

Our success is dependent on really talented people – just like you – who thrive on the collaboration and innovation that’s nurtured by a diverse and inclusive environment.