Principal Software Engineer, Mapping - Autonomous Vehicles

Details

NVIDIA seeks a passionate software engineer to build planet-scale maps supporting self-driving technology using crowdsourced data from millions of cars around the world. The role involves computer vision, geometry, pose estimation, sensor fusion, and large-scale systems. You will transform sparse perception signals and dense video clips into accurate, fresh maps that help autonomous vehicles understand the road with high-quality map priors, improving driving performance, safety, and coverage.

You will work with engineers across mapping, perception, reconstruction, localization, and autonomous driving to deliver impact to customers worldwide.

Responsibilities

• Build scalable mapping systems using crowdsourced perception data and multi-camera video collected from a vast number of vehicles.
• Develop 3D reconstruction, structure-from-motion, pose estimation, and multi-view geometry algorithms for large-scale road scene understanding.
• Build map fusion and change-detection methods that handle noisy observations, dynamic scenes, imperfect localization, and global consistency constraints.
• Build C++ production systems and offline pipelines that transform fleet data into reliable map products used in self-driving and driver support technologies.
• Invent evaluation methods to measure map accuracy, freshness, coverage, consistency, and downstream autonomy impact.
• Develop visualization, debugging, and triage tools to understand reconstruction quality, map issues, localization errors, and fleet data gaps.
• Work closely with perception, localization, simulation, planning, and infrastructure teams to integrate crowdsourced maps into autonomous driving systems.
• Improve the scale, fidelity, freshness, and reliability of maps built from real-world fleet data.

Requirements

• Strong programming skills in C++ and experience building production-quality software systems.
• Solid foundation in 3D computer vision, 3D geometry, multi-view geometry, structure from motion, SLAM, pose estimation, or related areas.
• Experience working with large-scale sensor data, including camera video, perception outputs, vehicle poses, GPS/IMU signals, lidar, radar, or map data.
• Ability to reason about coordinate frames, calibration, uncertainty, optimization, geometric consistency, and error propagation.
• Experience developing algorithms robust to noisy real-world data, dynamic objects, occlusions, incomplete coverage, and long-tail failures.
• Strong debugging and analytical skills, including the ability to inspect data visually, build metrics, and connect system-level failures to algorithmic root causes.
• 15+ years of experience.
• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, or a related technical field, or equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building maps, localization systems, 3D reconstruction systems, perception systems, or sensor-fusion pipelines for autonomous driving or advanced driver assistance systems.
• Background in large-scale mapping, crowdsourced map construction, map fusion, change detection, map freshness, road topology, lane geometry, or semantic map generation.

Benefits

• Base salary range of USD 272,000 to USD 431,250 per year, determined by location, experience, and pay for similar positions.
• Eligibility for equity and benefits.
• Comprehensive benefits package.
• NVIDIA is an equal opportunity employer committed to an inclusive work environment.