Principal Perception Engineer, Obstacle Foundation Models - Autonomous Vehicles

Details

Intelligent machines powered by artificial intelligence are transforming every industry. NVIDIA seeks an exceptional Principal Perception Engineer to lead the design and productization of next-generation autonomous driving perception stack. This is a senior individual contributor role with broad technical leadership, deep hands-on work in architecture, algorithms, and implementation, and a focus on modern transformer-based, multi-modal, and vision-language techniques where they add real value.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for 3D obstacle perception to support end-to-end autonomous driving functionalities.
• Design and develop advanced 3D perception models using multi-camera inputs and/or multi-sensor fusion (camera, radar, lidar) for obstacle detection and tracking; explore BEV and transformer-based 3D perception.
• Lead development of efficient, production-grade deep learning models: define objectives, select architectures, guide experimentation, and establish best practices for training and evaluation using techniques such as large-scale pretraining, distillation, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (e.g., LoRA).
• Define and drive KPI frameworks to quantify perception performance; analyze large-scale real and synthetic datasets to identify failure modes and improve accuracy, robustness, and efficiency; incorporate self-supervised and representation learning when beneficial.
• Lead data strategy for perception: specify data and labeling requirements, prioritize data collection and annotation, and collaborate with data and ground-truth teams; enable model-assisted workflows (active learning, auto-labeling, VLMs) and model-in-the-loop tooling.
• Partner with safety, systems, and software teams to ensure perception solutions meet product requirements for safety, latency, resource usage, and robustness and are ready for deployment at scale.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to other engineers and influence design and implementation across perception and autonomy teams.

Requirements

• 15+ years of hands-on experience developing deep learning–based perception or closely related systems for complex real-world problems.
• Strong proficiency in frameworks such as PyTorch and a track record of taking models from prototype to production.
• Demonstrated technical leadership as a senior/principal individual contributor: owning subsystems end-to-end, setting technical direction, making architectural decisions, and coordinating across teams.
• Proven experience in data-driven development and close collaboration with data, labeling, and ground-truth teams.
• Strong programming skills in Python and/or C++, with history of building reliable, high-performance, production-quality software.
• BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience).
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.

Ways to stand out from the crowd (preferred)

• Track record designing and deploying perception solutions for autonomous driving or robotics using camera-based deep learning at scale.
• Hands-on experience architecting and deploying DNN-based perception pipelines on embedded or real-time platforms; optimization for latency, memory, and compute constraints.
• Experience with modern architectures (CNNs, transformers) and techniques like large-scale pretraining, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (LoRA), or vision-language models (VLMs).
• Strong publication record or recognized contributions in deep learning, computer vision, or autonomous systems (CVPR, ICCV, NeurIPS, IROS).
• Deep understanding of 3D computer vision fundamentals: camera modeling and calibration (intrinsic/extrinsic), multi-view geometry, and 3D representations, ideally applied in transformer-based 3D or BEV perception pipelines.
• Experience with CUDA development and optimizing training/inference through custom CUDA kernels or other GPU-accelerated components.

Benefits

• Base salary range: 272,000 USD - 431,250 USD.
• Eligible for equity and company benefits (link provided in original posting).

Additional information

• Applications for this job will be accepted at least until July 9, 2026.
• NVIDIA uses AI tools in its recruiting processes and is an equal opportunity employer committed to inclusive hiring.