Principal Engineer - AV Simulation and Evaluation

Details

We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to architect and build core platform systems that accelerate Physical AI development, including Autonomous Driving (AV) and Robotics. This technical role focuses on 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, including AV and Robotics simulation infrastructure and AV performance evaluation.

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 such as Protobuf, Apache Arrow, Parquet, and MCAP.
• Collaborate with AI and Robotics teams to understand their simulation and evaluation needs.
• Build reliable services, APIs, data pipelines, and AV simulation and evaluation workflows and frameworks operating at the scale of hundreds of millions of runs per day.
• Optimize performance at every level, including 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.
• Drive the adoption of new standards and technologies in the Physical AI tooling ecosystem.

Requirements

• Bachelor's or master's degree in Computer Science, or equivalent experience.
• 15+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a focus on distributed systems and data-intensive applications.
• Proficiency in Go, Python, or Java, with experience operating across the full backend stack.
• Deep experience building high-performance, low-latency data systems, including binary serialization, efficient data encoding, and columnar data formats.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, including 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.
• Demonstrated success building foundational systems on which multiple teams depend, with high reliability and scale.
• Strong communication skills, including the ability to explain nuanced system design to technical and non-technical partners and communicate with users in their language.
• Ability to lead cross-functional projects, influence without authority, and work across organizational boundaries.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building orchestration or workflow execution systems, such as Temporal.io or similar workflow engines.
• Experience working with sensor data pipelines and domain formats, including ROS, MCAP, AV logs, Parquet, and Apache Arrow.
• Understanding of AV and Robotics concepts such as kinematics, control systems, computer vision, motion planning, and neural networks.
• Experience improving legacy systems through incremental migration, deprecation, and architecture cleanup.

Benefits

NVIDIA offers competitive salaries, a comprehensive benefits package, equity, and benefits for employees and their families. The expected base salary range for this position is USD 272,000–431,250. Applications will be accepted at least until November 6, 2026. NVIDIA is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to fostering an inclusive work environment.