# Harness Engineer at TryNearby

- Company: TryNearby (YC S26)
- What the company does: Local creators for local businesses. Backed by Y Combinator.
- Company website: https://trynearby.com
- Type: Startups
- Level: Mid level
- Location: CA, US
- Work setup: On-site
- Pay: $120K to $150K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-09-21
- Apply by: 2026-11-05
- Apply: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/trynearby/jobs/MtlKiOm-harness-engineer
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/trynearby-harness-engineer/

## 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

Tags: Engineering