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Harness Engineer

TryNearby · CA, US · On-site

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About TryNearby

Local creators for local businesses. Backed by Y Combinator.

About the role

You own those agents. Not the prompts alone, the whole system underneath them: how they understand what someone actually wants, how they call tools without breaking, how they hold context across a conversation that's been going for 6 months, and how they take real actions in the real world without us having to check their work. The harness. The layer coordinating LLMs, tools, memory, and async workflows. This is the actual engineering problem here and it's most of your week.

What they're looking for

  • 2+ years building software, with real experience building agent systems or harnesses. Not just calling an API in a side project
  • Strong conversational agent experience. This is the thing we weigh most heavily. Our product is a conversation, and someone who has only built single-turn or task-runner agents will struggle here
  • Strong database and system design
  • You've shipped agents that real people used and dealt with the fallout when they broke
  • Comfortable with ambiguity. There's no established playbook for most of this
  • Based in Orange County / willing to relocate and able to work onsite
More about this role

Most of our users never really touch our app. They text us. Restaurant owners and creators handle almost everything through conversation, and on our side that's a set of AI agents doing the booking, the follow-ups, the scheduling, and the problem solving.

You own those agents. Not the prompts alone, the whole system underneath them: how they understand what someone actually wants, how they call tools without breaking, how they hold context across a conversation that's been going for 6 months, and how they take real actions in the real world without us having to check their work.

Any text that comes in, your systems handle it.

The agents. Full ownership of both of our agents end to end. How they're built, what they can do, and what happens when they get something wrong.

The harness. The layer coordinating LLMs, tools, memory, and async workflows. This is the actual engineering problem here and it's most of your week.

Tooling that doesn't fall over. Schema validation, retries, permissions, error handling. An agent that calls a tool correctly 95% of the time is not good enough when it's booking real visits at real restaurants.

Evals . Frameworks that measure task completion,...

Read the full posting on TryNearby's site ↗

Engineering

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