Developer Relations Manager, Higher Education and Research - Foundational AI

NVIDIA Corporation; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 184,000 - 288,000; Full time

Job summary

NVIDIA Corporation is seeking a mission-driven Developer Relations Manager focused on Foundational AI Research to engage leading academic labs advancing next‑generation AI models and systems. You will work with top researchers to push model performance, efficiency and scale using NVIDIA software, systems and accelerated computing.

The role requires deep foundational AI expertise, strong research engagement, and hands‑on experience in AI inference or training research, with a PhD or equivalent

Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, AI, ML, Applied Mathematics, Electrical Engineering, or related field, or equivalent research experience.
• 5+ years in technology industry across software engineering, developer relations, technical partnerships, solutions architecture, or product management, including 3+ years in AI.
• Deep expertise in foundational AI including LLMs, multimodal models, generative AI, reasoning, and AI systems research.
• Strong understanding of model development lifecycle: pretraining, fine-tuning, evaluation, deployment, and serving.

Responsibilities

• Serve as trusted technical advisor to leading AI labs on foundation models, LLMs, multimodal AI, and AI systems.
• Identify high-impact research workloads to advance model performance and efficiency using NVIDIA platforms.
• Engage researchers to understand goals, blockers, infrastructure needs, and collaboration opportunities.
• Translate academic feedback into actionable insights for product roadmaps and developer programs.

Skills

AI research experience

PyTorch

JAX

Distributed training

Model serving

Education

PhD in Computer Science or related field

Tools

CUDA / CUDA-X libraries

Megatron / Transformer Engine

NVIDIA AI Enterprise

Job description

We are seeking a mission-driven Developer Relations Manager focused on Foundational AI Research to engage leading academic labs advancing the next generation of AI models, systems, and methods. In this role, you will work directly with top researchers building frontier AI systems, including large language models, multimodal models, reasoning systems, training methods, inference systems, model serving, and scalable AI infrastructure. You will help researchers adopt NVIDIA’s AI and accelerated computing platforms to push the boundaries of model performance, efficiency, and scale. The ideal candidate brings deep technical credibility in foundational AI, strong research engagement experience, and hands‑on expertise in either AI inference research or AI training research.

What you’ll be doing:

Serve as a trusted technical advisor to leading academic AI labs working on foundation models, LLMs, multimodal AI, reasoning, training, inference, and AI systems. Identify high-impact research workloads where NVIDIA software, systems, and accelerated computing platforms can advance model performance, scale, and efficiency. Engage principal investigators, postdocs, graduate researchers, and lab leadership to understand research goals, technical blockers, infrastructure needs, and collaboration opportunities. Track frontier AI research across papers, benchmarks, open‑source projects, and academic labs to identify emerging trends and future platform opportunities. Partner with Research Account Managers, Solution Architects, Product, Engineering, and Business Development teams to support researcher adoption and long‑term engagement. Represent researcher needs internally by translating academic feedback into actionable insights for product roadmaps, developer programs, education, and platform strategy. Support NVIDIA participation in major AI, ML, and systems research venues through technical content, workshops, university engagements, and lab‑facing programs.

What we need to see:

• PhD in Computer Science, AI, Machine Learning, Applied Mathematics, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent research experience.
• 5+ years of experience in the technology industry across software engineering, developer relations, technical partnerships, solutions architecture, or product management, including 3+ years of hands‑on experience in AI.
• Deep expertise in foundational AI, including LLMs, multimodal models, generative AI, reasoning, post‑training, model evaluation, or AI systems research.
• Strong understanding of modern AI model development across the lifecycle, including pretraining, fine‑tuning, post‑training, optimization, evaluation, deployment, and model serving.
• Hands‑on experience with AI research stacks such as PyTorch, JAX, distributed training frameworks, inference systems, model serving platforms, evaluation pipelines, and GPU‑accelerated workflows.
• Technical fluency in scalable AI systems, including distributed training, parallelism strategies, checkpointing, memory optimization, batching, scheduling, latency, throughput, and cost‑performance tradeoffs.
• Familiarity with methods that improve model efficiency and performance, such as quantization, distillation, sparsity, speculative decoding, attention optimization, synthetic data generation, RLHF/RLAIF, and preference optimization.
• Ability to engage top academic labs on frontier research challenges, including scaling behavior, compute efficiency, model quality, benchmark methodology, reproducibility, reliability, and research impact.
• Demonstrated research credibility through publications, open‑source contributions, academic collaborations, technical leadership, or direct work on frontier AI systems.

Ways to stand out from the crowd:

• Experience with NVIDIA AI platforms, including CUDA, CUDA‑X libraries, TensorRT‑LLM, Triton Inference Server, NIM, NeMo, Megatron, Transformer Engine, NCCL, DGX, NVLink, InfiniBand, or NVIDIA AI Enterprise.
• Established relationships with leading AI labs, academic institutions, research institutes, benchmark communities, or major open‑source AI projects.
• Track record translating frontier AI research into demos, tutorials, reference architectures, workshops, technical blogs, or developer enablement programs.
• Experience presenting at venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, AAAI , or related research workshops.
• Ability to identify emerging research trends and convert them into strategic opportunities for collaboration, platform adoption, and ecosystem growth.

NVIDIA is widely considered to be one of the technology world’s most desirable employers! We have some of the most forward‑thinking and hardworking people in the world working for us. If you’re creative and autonomous, we want to hear from you.

Your base salary will be determined based on your location, experience, and the pay of employees in similar positions. The base salary range is 152,000 USD - 241,500 USD for Level 3, and 184,000 USD - 287,500 USD for Level 4. You will also be eligible for equity and benefits.

Applications for this job will be accepted at least until September 25, 2026.

This posting is for an existing vacancy.

NVIDIA uses AI tools in its recruiting processes.

NVIDIA is committed to fostering an inclusive work environment and proud to be an equal opportunity employer. As we highly value diversity in our current and future employees, we do not discriminate (including in our hiring and promotion practices) on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status or any other characteristic protected by law.

Learn more about NVIDIA.