# Principal Software Engineer

**Company**: NVIDIA
**Location**: Santa Clara, CA
**Work arrangement**: remote
**Experience**: senior
**Job type**: full-time
**Salary**: 272,000 USD – 431,250 USD
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology

**Apply**: https://nvidia.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/NVIDIAExternalCareerSite/job/US-CA-Santa-Clara/Principal-Engineer---AV-Simulation-and-Evaluation_JR2029093?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_f0878e2d-449

## Description

We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to architect and build core platform systems to accelerate Physical AI development, such as Autonomous Driving (AV) & Robotics.

This is a technical role for someone with expertise at the intersection of data architecture, distributed systems, and Autonomous Vehicle development across cloud, local, and on-road environments.

**Responsibilities**

- Design and build simulation and evaluation infrastructure used by AV and ML engineers, to accelerate development of Level 4 self-driving capabilities.

- Evolve efficient data formats for AV evaluation: designing for performance, interoperability, and correctness across formats like Protobuf, Arrow, Parquet, and MCAP.

- Collaborate with AI and Robotics teams to deeply understand their simulation and evaluation needs.

- Build reliable services, APIs, data pipelines, and AV simulation and evaluation workflows and framework that operate at the scale of hundreds of millions of runs per day.

- Optimize performance at every level: profiling, parallelization, memory efficiency, query optimization, and protocol redesign.

- Build diagnostic and observability tooling that enables teams to understand and debug their data and test pipelines.

- Actively drive the adoption of new standards and technologies in the physical AI tooling ecosystem.

**Requirements**

- BS or MS in Computer Science (or equivalent experience).

- 15+ years of professional experience in software engineering with focus on distributed systems and data-intensive applications.

- Proficiency in Go, Python, or Java, and experience operating across the full backend stack.

- Deep experience building high-performance low-latency data systems: binary serialization, efficient data encoding, columnar data formats.

- Strong understanding of distributed systems: concurrency, consistency tradeoffs, latency optimization, and compute-efficient design.

- Ability to identify and fix performance bottlenecks through optimization across the stack, including redesigning protocols and data models.

- Experience designing and implementing workflows across distributed systems.

- Past success building foundational systems that multiple teams depend on, with high reliability and scale.

- Communication skills to be able to translate nuanced system design to both technical and non-technical partners, and talk to users in their language.

- Ability to lead cross-functional projects, influence without authority, and get work done across organizational boundaries.

**Nice to Have**

- Experience building orchestration or workflow execution systems (e.g., Temporal.io, similar workflow engines)

- Experience working with sensor data pipelines: ROS, MCAP, AV logs, Parquet, Apache Arrow, or similar domain formats

- Understanding of AV & Robotics concepts such as kinematics, control systems, computer vision, motion planning, and/or neural networks

- Experience improving legacy systems through incremental migration, deprecation, and architecture cleanup.

NVIDIA offers highly competitive salaries and a comprehensive benefits package.

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## Skills

### Required
- distributed systems
- data-intensive applications
- Go
- Python
- Java
- binary serialization
- efficient data encoding
- columnar data formats
- concurrency
- consistency tradeoffs
- latency optimization
- compute-efficient design

### Nice to have
- Temporal.io
- workflow engines
- ROS
- MCAP
- AV logs
- Parquet
- Apache Arrow
- kinematics
- control systems
- computer vision
- motion planning
- neural networks

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Source: [Apply at nvidia.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com](https://nvidia.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/NVIDIAExternalCareerSite/job/US-CA-Santa-Clara/Principal-Engineer---AV-Simulation-and-Evaluation_JR2029093?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)