Senior Applied Research Engineer - Accelerator Programming Model and Compiler

As the world's leading accelerated computing company, NVIDIA is seeking a Senior Applied Research Engineer to work on the next-generation programming model for NVIDIA's Programmable Vision Accelerator (PVA).

The successful candidate will explore and innovate new methods for expressing PVA workloads through higher-level declarative abstractions, domain-specific languages, and compiler/runtime interfaces.

Responsibilities:

• Work on the next-generation PVA programming model for developers and AI coding agents, making it easier to build optimized algorithms for PVA.
• Enable AI agent-driven PVA development by abstracting hardware-specific details into agent-accessible, declarative interfaces, supported by improvements to compile time, emulator speed, and diagnostic tooling.
• Help define the architecture and feature set of the PVA SDK, runtime APIs, and programming model.
• Define benchmarks and evaluations for agent-generated PVA code and use them to improve the compiler optimizations and diagnostics.
• Develop and actively improve the LLVM-based VPU compiler backend targeting VLIW/SIMD architecture.
• Research and define efficient integration models for PVA workloads in CUDA-based heterogeneous pipelines, including execution, memory movement, and synchronization.
• Drive deep technical integrations with internal and external customers to improve adoption and shape PVA runtime API for real-world workloads.

Requirements:

• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related field, or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years of experience building high-performance, low-level systems software, accelerator software, embedded software, or compiler/toolchain infrastructure.
• Experience building higher-level programming abstractions, DSLs, or compiler IRs that abstract hardware complexity while preserving performance.
• Experience with compiler, debugger, linker, or toolchain development, particularly using LLVM.
• Experience developing code with agents , Claude Code, Cursor, Open AI, and inference SDKs.
• Background integrating compilers and developer tools with AI coding agents or agentic development harnesses.
• Experience programming SIMD/VLIW processors.
• Excellent software development skills in C++, including low-level debugging and performance profiling.
• Experience with Linux or QNX development environments.
• Strong communication and social skills.

Benefits:

• Competitive salaries
• Generous benefits package