Distinguished Engineer, AI Safety and Security Engineering

NVIDIA Corporation; Santa Clara, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 320,000 - 489,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Benefits

Job summary

NVIDIA Corporation seeks a Distinguished Engineer to be the founding technical leader of the AI Safety & Security Engineering team in Santa Clara, CA. You will own the core harness architecture, establish baseline engineering standards, and drive a roadmap from prototypes to production, enabling safe, verifiable AI systems across the company.

You will mentor early engineers, collaborate with managers and evaluation teams, and ensure designs meet safety standards without slowing velocity; your

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree (or equivalent) with 18+ years designing and building complex systems.
• Deep experience architecting distributed systems, ML pipelines, or large-scale platforms.
• Track record turning research into production-grade engineering.
• Ability to align engineers and researchers on a common technical direction.

Responsibilities

• Define the canonical harness architecture and component baseline.
• Set engineering standards the team will follow.
• Guide the Find, Validate, and Patch technical roadmap.
• Mentor founding engineers and support their growth.

Skills

Distributed systems design

ML pipelines

Technical leadership

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience

Job description

NVIDIA is seeking a Distinguished Engineer to serve as the founding technical leader for our AI Safety & Security Engineering team. Rooted in the firm belief that open-weight models, transparency, and broad scientific scrutiny are foundational to American AI leadership and cybersecurity defense, our newly assembled team builds AI-powered tooling to discover, validate, and patch software vulnerabilities. In this foundational role, you will take full ownership of the core harness architecture and baseline engineering standards, guiding our program from early-stage prototypes into a dependable, reviewable production pipeline. Your technical roadmap will dictate how NVIDIA designs, tests, and validates its safety-critical AI systems for years to come. Recognizing that technical leadership is fundamentally collaborative, you will work side-by-side with engineering managers, security partners, and evaluation teams to build consensus through active listening and transparent reasoning.You will act as the crucial bridge between exploratory research ideas and rigorous software engineering, finding balanced paths forward where innovation meets enterprise reliability. Beyond system design, teaching and mentorship are primary components of this position rather than optional add-ons. You will actively review designs across the organization, keeping code quality and safety standards highly visible without hindering engineering velocity. Ultimately, the architectural frameworks and team culture you establish early on will outlive any single component, directly shaping both the careers of founding engineers and the future of secure AI systems.## **What You'll Be Doing:*** Architecture: Define the canonical harness architecture and component baseline.* Engineering standards: Set the engineering standards the team builds on.* Technical roadmap: Guide the Find, Validate, and Patch technical roadmap.* Mentorship: Mentor founding engineers and support their growth.## ## **What We Need To See:*** Bachelor's degree (or equivalent experience) with 18+ years designing and building complex systems.* Architecture depth: Deep experience architecting distributed systems, ML pipelines, or large-scale platforms.* Research to production: A record of turning research into production-grade engineering.* Collaboration: Ability to align engineers and researchers on one technical direction.## **Ways to Stand Out from the Crowd:*** Security exposure: Vulnerability research or security engineering experience.* Agent systems: Familiarity with agent frameworks or LLM-based tooling.* Evaluation: Experience building evaluation or benchmarking infrastructure.With competitive salaries and a generous benefits package, NVIDIA is widely considered to be one of the technology industry's most desirable employers. We have some of the most forward-thinking and versatile people in the world working with us, and our engineering teams are growing fast in some of the most impactful fields of our generation: Confidential Computing and Data. If you're a creative engineer who enjoys autonomy and shares our passion for technology, 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 320,000 USD - 488,750 USD.You will also be eligible for equity and benefits.