Principal Software Engineer

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.