Principal Engineer - AV Simulation and Evaluation
At a glance
Senior Engineering Leadership role at NVIDIA. US, CA, Santa Clara · full-time · $272,000–$431,250 base.
techroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Build simulation and evaluation systems that help AV and machine-learning engineers advance Level 4 self-driving work
- Shape fast, interoperable data formats for AV evaluation, including Protobuf, Arrow, Parquet and MCAP
- Create dependable services, APIs and pipelines for simulation workflows running at hundreds of millions of runs daily
- Find and remove bottlenecks through profiling, parallel work, memory tuning, query improvements and protocol changes
- Develop diagnostic tools for teams to inspect and troubleshoot their data and testing pipelines
What you bring
- At least fifteen years in software engineering focused on distributed systems and data-heavy applications
- A computer science bachelor's or master's degree, or equivalent practical experience
- Strong backend skills in Go, Python or Java, with experience across the backend stack
- Hands-on background building fast, low-latency data systems using binary serialization and columnar formats
Who this fits
This senior, hands-on technical role suits an engineer who can own foundational systems and lead work across teams without relying on formal authority. You'll collaborate with AI and robotics groups and explain system design to technical and nontechnical partners. The stated base salary range is $272,000 to $431,250 per year, with eligibility for equity and benefits.
From the employer
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. You will own deep technical areas end-to-end: such as AV/Robotics simulation infrastructure and AV performance evaluation.
What you will be doing:
- 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.
What We Need to See:
- 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.
Ways to Stand Out from the crowd:
- 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.
Widely considered to be one of the technology world’s most desirable employers, NVIDIA offers highly competitive salaries and a comprehensive benefits package. As you plan your future, see what we can offer to you and your family www.nvidiabenefits.com/
Your base salary will be determined based on your location, experience, and other objective job-related factors. The expected base salary range for this position is 272,000 USD – 431,250 USD.You will also be eligible for equity and benefits.
Applications for this job will be accepted at least until November 6, 2026.This posting is for an existing vacancy.
NVIDIA uses AI tools in its recruiting processes.
NVIDIA is committed to fostering an inclusive work environment and proud to be an equal opportunity employer. As we highly value diversity in our current and future employees, we do not discriminate (including in our hiring and promotion practices) on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status or any other characteristic protected by law.
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