Project NANDA Fellowship Program
Senior Research AI Fellow
Senior technical role at the intersection of systems research and real-world infrastructure.
About Project NANDA
Project NANDA (Networked Agents and Decentralized AI) is building the foundational infrastructure for an Internet of AI Agents. The existing internet was designed for humans — DNS resolves domain names typed by people, HTTP serves documents to browsers, PKI authenticates websites for users. 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.
NANDA's architecture spans discovery (a federated index for agents), identity (cryptographically signed capability documents), federation (a distributed registry across 15+ institutions), and interoperability (native support for MCP, A2A, and NLWeb). NEST is the platform where agents are deployed, registered, and orchestrated on this stack.
Position overview
You'll contribute to NANDA's core architecture — not just building demos, but making decisions that affect how the system scales, how protocols evolve, and how research translates into production.
You'll work closely with researchers and open-source leaders. Your output spans both shipped infrastructure and published work. The role requires someone rigorous enough for research, pragmatic enough to ship.
What you'll own
- Core infrastructure decisions on NEST and the NANDA Index — architecture, not just implementation
- Design systems built to scale: federation, replication, consistency tradeoffs, failure handling
- Translate research problems into tractable engineering
- Mentor junior fellows — catch architectural mistakes before they compound
- Contribute to research artifacts, technical writing, and publications
- Own entire subsystems, not just features
What We're Looking For
- 5+ years of engineering experience, with exposure to research environments
- Exceptional fundamentals: networking, distributed systems, databases, operating systems
- You've built something that scaled and lived with the consequences
- Research literacy — you can read systems papers and judge what's worth building
- Full-stack competence: schema design to API to frontend when needed
- Strong architectural judgment — you're who others consult when a design feels off
- You write clearly — research-adjacent work requires precise communication
Nice to Have
- Familiarity with agentic frameworks, MCP, A2A, or multi-agent coordination
- Background in decentralized systems, federated architectures, or DIDs
- Prior work at the research-engineering boundary
- Experience with protocol design or developer-facing infrastructure
Communication & collaboration
- Ability to lead technical discussions and mentor across experience levels
- Comfort in fast-moving, research-driven environments with evolving requirements
- Strong written documentation for open-source and community audiences
Apply now