Principal Software Engineer - Compute Infrastructure

Details

NVIDIA is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead the architectural vision for a massive global compute platform and operationalize an internal frontier-class AI inference system. The role focuses on driving efficiency, defining platform architecture, and optimizing infrastructure performance across on-premises and cloud environments.

Responsibilities

• Architect and transform a global enterprise compute platform running thousands of nodes and tens of thousands of virtual machines and containers through OpenShift and KubeVirt.
• Define service tiers, SLAs, and automated cluster lifecycles.
• Build the operational foundation for an internal AI inference platform supporting frontier-class models.
• Develop automated remediation pipelines, hardware watchdogs, and telemetry for pre-release, rack-scale GPU systems, including Blackwell and upcoming architectures.
• Collect and review system data for capacity planning amid hardware supply constraints.
• Develop capacity strategies involving public cloud bursting, hardware dogfooding, and alternative compute architectures such as ARM.
• Design self-service architectures, APIs, and Terraform/OpenTofu providers to drive adoption of standard platforms across autonomous engineering teams.
• Evaluate application architectures and lead migrations of large legacy workloads, including long-running VDI environments, to modern Kubernetes orchestration.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 15+ years of experience in compute platform engineering, site reliability, or systems architecture, with a strong focus on automation at massive scale.
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes architecture and virtualization architectures, specifically operating virtual machines inside Kubernetes with KubeVirt and OpenShift.
• In-depth knowledge of hardware technologies, including GPUs and high-speed backplane networking, with experience mitigating hardware-level failures, silent data corruption, and anomalies in large-scale environments.
• Experience operating large global environments spanning bare metal, virtualized infrastructure, and cloud with a unified GitOps approach using ArgoCD or similar tools.
• Proficiency in Go and/or Python, along with expert-level infrastructure-as-code development using Terraform and configuration management tools.
• Strong leadership skills and the ability to influence technical direction across highly autonomous teams without relying on top-down mandates.

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on experience managing bleeding-edge, pre-release hardware in production environments.
• Deep understanding of advanced storage migrations and protocols, including NFSv4, NVMe/TCP, and hyperconverged storage.
• Understanding of microservices architecture and multi-cloud deployment strategies involving AWS and GCP.
• Proven experience building Day 2 operational maturity, including self-service, advanced auto-remediation, and strict SLAs, on existing foundations.

Benefits

• Base salary range of USD 248,000 to USD 391,000, determined by location, experience, and comparable employee compensation.
• Eligibility for equity and benefits.
• NVIDIA is committed to an inclusive work environment and is an equal opportunity employer.

Applications will be accepted at least until September 3, 2026.