Principal Software Engineer, Agent Policy Fabric

Description

The Cloud Engineering & Services team is building an enterprise governance layer for agentic systems. It covers signed policy, runtime verification, policy projection, credential mediation, detector verdict handling, and shared audit across runtime substrates and enterprise integrations.

You will take the scoped APF v0 proof of life and turn it into a solid core platform for governed agent actions. The work lays the groundwork for signed policy, the Runtime Policy Verifier, projection, conformance, and failure modes that future APF deployments will rely on.

This is a Principal Software Engineer role on the APF Core Platform, based in the Cloud Engineering & Services team.

Responsibilities

• Build and harden the core APF services: the Runtime Policy Verifier, signed policy bundle verification, trust-root handling, freshness checks, rollback protection, binding subjects to attested runtime context, revocation checks, and the authorization APIs that APF-compatible enforcement points call.
• Implement deterministic projections from the canonical APF policy into OpenShell-native runtime policy, adapter constraints, credential constraints, audit requirements, and model-visible tool hints. Keep the atomic projection-admission contract intact.
• Create golden fixtures, compatibility tests, negative tests, fuzz and property tests, and conformance suites that show APF-compatible runtimes and adapters follow the same contract.
• Work with OpenShell and Infrastructure engineers on public runtime interfaces: projection consumption, runtime context attestation, approved adapter paths, direct egress verification, and admission and rejection semantics.
• Own the cross-team work with OpenShell and other runtime owners to deliver the public substrate interfaces APF builds on: runtime-context attestation, approved adapter path declaration, projection acceptance and rejection, quarantine, and stop-session hooks. Deliver each one as a public RFC or PR.
• Set the architecture direction: versioning, schema compatibility, latency budgets, availability behavior, fail-closed defaults, last-known-good policy handling, and the engineering review material that Product Security, Fleet, Identity, and partner teams will review.
• Write the specifications, defend bounded security and architecture claims in reviews, resolve open decisions, and turn working-draft contracts into engineering artifacts that Product Security, Fleet, Identity, and partner runtimes can adopt.

Requirements

• A bachelor's degree or equivalent experience, plus 15+ years of industry experience in systems software, security engineering, distributed systems, or policy infrastructure.
• Strong programming skills in Rust, Go, C++, or Python. You have designed production services, APIs, schemas, policy engines, authorization systems, or signed artifact pipelines.
• Working knowledge of Linux systems, IPC or service-to-service APIs, protobuf or gRPC or similar wire formats, CI, test automation, release engineering, and cloud or enterprise deployment environments.
• Hands-on experience with authorization, cryptographic signatures, trust roots, revocation, subject binding, rollback protection, secure-by-default failure handling, and zero-trust architecture.
• You can write concise technical specifications, align several engineering owners, defend bounded claims, and turn working-draft architecture into interfaces that can be built, without over-scoping the runtime.
• Nice to have: experience with OPA/Rego, Cedar, Zanzibar-style authorization, policy compilers, sandbox policy, or runtime enforcement systems.
• Nice to have: familiarity with agent frameworks, tool-call governance, sandboxed execution, OpenShell-like runtime substrates, MCP-style tool routing, or credential isolation for agents.
• Nice to have: experience with Sigstore, TUF, in-toto, HSM-backed signing, package provenance, signed configuration, or enterprise trust-root distribution.
• Nice to have: experience with property testing, model checking, symbolic execution, red-team findings, or bounded verification used to constrain security claims.
• Nice to have: experience contributing to RFCs in identity, supply-chain, or policy areas (IETF, OpenID Foundation, FIDO Alliance, CNCF, NIST).

Conditions

Base salary depends on location, experience, and other objective job-related factors. The expected base salary range is 272,000 USD to 431,250 USD.

Applications will be accepted at least until November 3, 2026.

This posting is for an existing vacancy.

The company uses AI tools in its recruiting process.

The company is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of any legally protected characteristic.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and a generous benefits package.