Principal Software Engineer, Cloud Infrastructure

at Nvidia

USD 272,000-431,200 per year

SENIOR

✅ On-site

Tech Stack
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AI API @ 7 Ceph @ 4 Communication @ 6 Debugging @ 6 Distributed Systems @ 8 GPU @ 4 IaC InfiniBand @ 4 Leadership @ 8 Linux @ 7 MySQL @ 4 NVLink @ 4 Networking @ 4 OpenStack @ 7 Profiling Python @ 7 RabbitMQ @ 4 SRE Security Software Development @ 7

Details

We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to drive the architecture and development of bare-metal and cloud compute infrastructure. The organization supports hundreds of megawatts of datacenter capacity and provides reliable, secure, and efficient compute services for NVIDIA engineering.

The NVIDIA GPU private cloud provides infrastructure for continuous integration and validation. Hardware, firmware, drivers, networking, and system software are coordinated and tested on their path to production. The fleet includes x86 and Arm servers, GPUs, DPUs, high-speed networking, storage, and rack-scale systems. Platforms include Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin.

This senior individual contributor role combines hands-on software engineering with architectural leadership. The successful candidate will evolve the OpenStack platform, automate infrastructure operations, and address complex systems challenges across multiple datacenters.

Responsibilities

Own the architecture and lead implementation of large-scale OpenStack infrastructure supporting bare-metal provisioning, virtual machines, and engineering workloads across several datacenters around the globe.
Architect and implement Infrastructure as Code frameworks to automate provisioning, configuration, and lifecycle management across OpenStack and bare-metal environments using version-controlled definitions, automated validation, drift detection, and safe rollback.
Build and improve compute control planes, resource scheduling, topology-aware placement, reservations, and capacity management for heterogeneous hardware.
Develop and extend OpenStack services and integrations, including Nova, Neutron, Ironic, Cinder, Keystone, and Placement, based on platform requirements.
Improve platform scalability, availability, and performance through architectural changes, profiling, failure analysis, and elimination of operational bottlenecks.
Build safe deployment, upgrade, migration, and rollback mechanisms that minimize disruption to engineering workloads.
Partner with SRE, datacenter operations, security, and product engineering teams to onboard new platforms and resolve failures across system boundaries.

Requirements

15+ years of proven experience in software engineering, distributed systems, or cloud infrastructure, demonstrating leadership in diverse technical initiatives across teams.
A bachelor's or master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
Deep experience crafting, developing, deploying, and fixing production OpenStack environments, particularly Nova, Neutron, and Ironic.
Strong software development skills in Python and experience building maintainable services, APIs, and infrastructure automation.
Strong understanding of distributed systems, including concurrency, state management, asynchronous workflows, failure handling, and recovery.
Deep Linux systems knowledge and experience with virtualization, KVM/QEMU, containers, and guest operating-system provisioning.
Proven understanding of cloud networking, including L2/L3 networking, VLANs, overlays, DHCP, PXE boot, routing, and tenant isolation.
Experience with databases and messaging infrastructure supporting cloud control planes, such as MySQL/MariaDB and RabbitMQ.
Experience operating infrastructure with demanding reliability requirements, including monitoring, incident response, system resources, and production upgrades.
Excellent debugging skills across hardware, firmware, operating systems, communication systems, data storage, and distributed services.
Ability to translate ambiguous requirements into technical direction and influence engineering teams across organizational boundaries and time zones.

Preferred Qualifications

Contributions to OpenStack or related open-source projects, including upstream features, bug fixes, performance improvements, or architectural proposals.
Experience scaling OpenStack across multiple regions or datacenters, including control-plane resilience, fleet upgrades, and workload migration.
Expertise in Ironic, Redfish, BMC integration, and provisioning or recovering large bare-metal fleets.
Experience with Ceph, distributed storage, and storage integration with OpenStack.
Experience with GPU and Arm platforms, PCIe pass-through, SR-IOV, NVLink, InfiniBand, or high-speed Ethernet.
A record of delivering architectural improvements that measurably increase reliability, scalability, utilization, or developer efficiency.

Benefits

Expected base salary range: $272,000–$431,250 USD.
Eligibility for equity and benefits.
Comprehensive benefits package.
NVIDIA is committed to fostering an inclusive work environment and is an equal opportunity employer.

Applications will be accepted at least until November 13, 2026. This posting is for an existing vacancy. NVIDIA uses AI tools in its recruiting processes.