Principal Architect, AI Networking at Scale

NVIDIA; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 272,000 - 431,000; Full time

Job summary

NVIDIA’s Networking Systems & Software Architecture group invites a Principal Architect to steer the research agenda for scalable AI communication across GPUs, DPUs, NICs, and storage. You will define project scope from inception, publish original work, and translate breakthroughs into production-grade software deployed industry-wide.

You will lead multi-faceted efforts in RDMA, NVLink, and GPUDirect, mentor engineers, and shape standards with industry forums while delivering cross-team impact.

Qualifications

• 15+ years in systems software and/or networking with deep expertise in high-performance networking (InfiniBand, RoCE, RDMA, NVLink) and GPU-accelerated systems.
• MS, PhD or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
• Deep understanding of computer architecture, memory hierarchies, DMA engines, and OS-level networking.
• Understanding of ML systems concepts—transformer architectures, KV cache mechanics, model parallelism, or distributed training and inference patterns.
• Proficiency in programming languages such as C, C++, Rust and Python.

Responsibilities

• Setting the long-term technical vision for distributed AI communication systems—GPU-to-GPU, GPU-to-storage, and cross-node data movement.
• Conducting original research and prototyping next-generation networking solutions over RDMA, NVLink, and GPUDirect.
• Driving hardware-software co-optimization with GPU, DPU, NIC, and network switch. Investigating fundamental bottlenecks in communication runtimes for large-scale AI workloads.
• Integrating networking capabilities into AI serving stacks such as vLLM, SGLang, and TensorRT-LLM.
• Publishing findings, representing NVIDIA in industry forums and standards bodies, and mentoring senior engineers across the organization.

Skills

High-performance networking

C/C++

Rust

Python

GPU-accelerated systems

Education

MS/PhD or equivalent

Tools

NIXL

NCCL

UCX

MPI

NVSHMEM

Job description

NVIDIA’s Networking Systems & Software Architecture group invites a Principal Architect to steer the research agenda for scalable AI communication across GPUs, DPUs, NICs, and storage. You will define project scope from inception, publish original work, and translate breakthroughs into production-grade software deployed industry-wide.

You will lead multi-faceted efforts in RDMA, NVLink, and GPUDirect, mentor engineers, and shape standards with industry forums while delivering cross-team impact.