Autonomous Vehicle Engineering Director

Nvidia Corporation in; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 320,000 - 489,000; Full time

Job summary

NVIDIA in Santa Clara, CA is seeking a Director of Engineering for Autonomous Vehicles (Finance) to define and lead a next-generation architecture that blends classical safety systems with learning-based driving. You will build and scale a world-class organization spanning prediction, planning, control, safety, and AI models.

The role requires a track record of leading engineers, deep systems thinking, and ability to translate research into production.

Qualifications

• PhD with 12+ years, MS with 10+ years, or BS (or equivalent experience) with 15+ overall years of relevant industry experience in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Robotics, Machine Learning, or a related technical field.
• 8+ years of experience leading a team.
• Significant technical leadership experience, including leading senior engineers, architects, and/or engineering managers working on sophisticated production systems.
• Extensive knowledge of traditional driverless vehicle system designs, including prediction, planning, decision making, control, safety, redundancy, and fallback systems.
• Solid grasp of modern learning-based autonomy, including end-to-end driving models, foundation models, large-scale machine learning systems, or embodied AI.
• Experience driving end-to-end self-driving system builds and understanding interactions involving perception as well as planning and control.
• Demonstrated ability to attract, recruit, mentor, and grow exceptional engineering talent.
• Excellent interpersonal skills with a capacity to influence technical experts, executives, researchers, and cross-functional partners.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical vision and architecture for NVIDIA's next-generation autonomous driving stack, spanning both classical and learning-based approaches.
• Build and lead a high-performing organization of engineers and technical leaders working across Prediction, Decision Making, Planning, Control, and Safety.
• Define how classical safety-critical autonomy and learned driving systems work together within a unified production architecture.
• Drive the architecture for robust system-level safety, redundancy, fallback, and degraded-mode strategies.
• Lead the development and productionization of end-to-end, data-driven autonomous driving pipelines, from perception and reasoning through trajectory building and vehicle operation.
• Advance large-scale vision-language-action (VLA) / driving foundation models and their integration into production autonomous vehicles.
• Partner closely with research teams to translate breakthroughs in robotics, embodied AI, foundation models, and generative AI into production self-driving technology.

Skills

Technical leadership

Autonomous driving

Prediction

Planning

Control systems

Safety engineering

Machine learning

Team building

Education

PhD in CS/Robotics

MS in CS/Robotics

BS with 15+ years experience

Tools

CUDA

GPU computing

Distributed systems

Job description

NVIDIA in Santa Clara, CA is seeking a Director of Engineering for Autonomous Vehicles (Finance) to define and lead a next-generation architecture that blends classical safety systems with learning-based driving. You will build and scale a world-class organization spanning prediction, planning, control, safety, and AI models.

The role requires a track record of leading engineers, deep systems thinking, and ability to translate research into production.