Project NANDA Fellowship Program
Senior Research Fellow
Senior technical role at the intersection of systems research and real-world infrastructure, building the foundational infrastructure for an Internet of AI Agents
Position overview
Project NANDA (Networked Agents and Decentralized AI) is an initiative led by Prof. Ramesh Raskar, building the foundational infrastructure for an Internet of AI Agents. The core problem: the existing internet was designed for humans. DNS resolves domain names typed by people. HTTP serves documents to browsers. PKI authenticates websites for users clicking padlocks. None of it handles billions of autonomous agents that need to discover each other, verify capabilities, and transact in milliseconds — without a human in the loop.
This is a senior technical role at the intersection of systems research and real-world infrastructure. You'll be contributing to NANDA's core architecture — not just building demos, but making decisions that affect how the system scales, how protocols evolve, and how the research translates into something that actually holds up under production conditions.
You'll work closely with Researchers, Open Source leaders and your output will span both shipped infrastructure and published work. The role requires someone who can operate at both levels — rigorous enough for research, pragmatic enough to ship.
What you'll do
- Core infrastructure decisions on NEST and the NANDA Index — not just implementation but the architectural reasoning behind it
- Designing systems that are built to scale from the start — federation, replication, consistency tradeoffs, failure handling
- Translating research problems into tractable engineering: reading a paper, identifying what's implementable, and building it
- Mentoring faster-moving junior fellows — being the person who catches architectural mistakes before they compound
- Contributing to research artifacts, technical writing, and publications
- Owning entire subsystems, not just features
Expertise you may have
- 5+ years of engineering experience, with some exposure to research environments — academia, applied research, or industry R&D
- Exceptional fundamentals. Networking, distributed systems, databases, operating systems — you know why things work, not just how to use them
- You've built something that scaled and lived with the consequences. You know what breaks at 10x and how to design for it upfront
- Research literacy — you can read systems papers, extract the core ideas, and make a judgment call on whether something is worth building
- Full-stack competence: you're not a specialist who only operates in one layer. You can go from schema design to API to frontend when needed
- Strong architectural judgment — you're the person others come to when a design decision feels off
- You write clearly. Research-adjacent work requires communicating ideas precisely, not just building them
Bonus
- Familiarity with agentic frameworks, MCP, A2A, or multi-agent coordination patterns — easy to learn with your background
- Background in decentralized systems, federated architectures, or verifiable credentials / DIDs
- Prior work that sits at the research-engineering boundary — a paper you implemented, an open-source system others depend on, a prototype that became production
- You've worked on protocol design or developer-facing infrastructure
Communication & collaboration
- Ability to lead technical discussions and mentor across experience levels
- Comfort working in fast-moving, research-driven environments with evolving requirements
- Strong written documentation skills for open-source and community audiences
Hiring process
Two technical rounds, both hands-on. We care about how you think through problems and how you approach systems design — not trivia or leetcode. This role has more responsibility and more ambiguity than a typical senior engineering job. There's no product roadmap to execute against. You'll be defining what needs to be built, building it, and justifying it — sometimes in the same week. If that sounds exhausting, it probably isn't the right fit. If that sounds like exactly what's been missing, let's talk.
Apply now