Senior Software Engineer - Applied Research in Robotics

As a Senior Software Engineer - Applied Research in Robotics at NVIDIA, you will research, prototype, and optimize robotics solutions using NVIDIA's Programmable Vision Accelerator (PVA).

Your role involves identifying high-impact robotics workloads and mapping them to efficient execution on the PVA. You will work at the intersection of robotics systems, sensor and actuator processing, heterogeneous computing, and algorithm optimization to improve latency, determinism, power efficiency, and throughput for real-time robotics systems.

Key responsibilities include:

• Researching and analyzing end-to-end robotics software stacks to discover, characterize, and prioritize high-impact workloads that can be accelerated on PVA.
• Designing, implementing, testing, and optimizing PVA operators for robotics workloads, including end-to-end integration into real robotics pipelines.
• Researching parallelization and data movement strategies for mapping robotics algorithms onto PVA efficiently.
• Working across camera, RADAR, LiDAR, IMU, perception, planning, and actuator paths to understand algorithmic requirements, memory behavior, timing constraints, and real-time execution needs.
• Building benchmarks, validation infrastructure, and providing technical mentorship for robotics teams adopting PVA acceleration.
• Collaborating with robotics, hardware architecture, compiler, system software, sensor, and platform teams to define acceleration strategies and interfaces.
• Supporting internal and external teams developing and optimizing robotics algorithms on PVA.
• Leveraging modern AI-assisted development tools and agentic workflows to accelerate workload analysis, algorithm creation, benchmarking, and performance exploration.
• Writing high-quality, maintainable C/C++ code, performance tests, user documentation, and validation infrastructure for robotics acceleration workflows.

Requirements:

• BS/MS or PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 5+ years of experience in robotics software, embedded systems, accelerated computing, computer vision, sensor processing, perception systems, or related areas.
• Strong robotics algorithm knowledge, with practical understanding of perception, sensor fusion, control, planning, or actuator pipelines.
• Strong C/C++ programming skills, including low-level debugging, performance profiling, optimization, and production-quality software development.
• Experience analyzing algorithms and mapping workloads to heterogeneous hardware such as CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, SIMD/VLIW processors, or domain-specific accelerators.
• Deep understanding of embedded systems, SoC architecture, memory hierarchy, cache behavior, DMA, real-time scheduling, and performance bottlenecks.
• Experience with embedded Linux and/or QNX development environments.
• Experience with robotics middleware, ROS 2, real robot bring-up, sensor integration, or actuator/control paths.
• Strong communication, collaboration, analytical, and problem-solving skills in a fast-paced multi-functional environment.