Principal AV Simulation & Data Platform Architect

NVIDIA Corporation; United States; Remote; USD 272,000 - 431,000; Full time

Job summary

NVIDIA seeks a Principal Software Engineer to architect and build core platform systems for accelerating Physical AI development, including Autonomous Driving and Robotics. You will own end-to-end areas such as AV/Robotics simulation infrastructure and performance evaluation.

The role requires deep expertise in distributed data systems, Go/Python/Java, and high-performance data formats, with a proven track record delivering scalable, reliable foundations used by multiple teams.

Qualifications

• BS or MS in Computer Science (or equivalent experience).
• 15+ years of professional experience in software engineering with focus on distributed systems and data-intensive applications.
• Proficiency in Go, Python, or Java, and experience operating across the full backend stack.
• Deep experience building high-performance low-latency data systems: binary serialization, efficient data encoding, columnar data formats.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems: concurrency, consistency tradeoffs, latency optimization, and compute-efficient design.
• Ability to identify and fix performance bottlenecks through optimization across the stack, including redesigning protocols and data models.
• Experience designing and implementing workflows across distributed systems.
• Past success building foundational systems that multiple teams depend on, with high reliability and scale.
• Communication skills to be able to translate nuanced system design to both technical and non-technical partners, and talk to users in their language.
• Ability to lead cross-functional projects, influence without authority, and get work done across organizational boundaries.

Responsibilities

• Design and build simulation and evaluation infrastructure used by AV and ML engineers, to accelerate development of Level 4 self-driving capabilities.
• Evolve efficient data formats for AV evaluation: designing for performance, interoperability, and correctness across formats like Protobuf, Arrow, Parquet, and MCAP.
• Collaborate with AI and Robotics teams to deeply understand their simulation and evaluation needs.
• Build reliable services, APIs, data pipelines, and AV simulation and evaluation workflows and framework that operate at the scale of hundreds of millions of runs per day.
• Optimize performance at every level: profiling, parallelization, memory efficiency, query optimization, and protocol redesign.
• Build diagnostic and observability tooling that enables teams to understand and debug their data and test pipelines.
• Actively drive the adoption of new standards and technologies in the physical AI tooling ecosystem.

Skills

Go/Python/Java

Distributed systems

Data-intensive apps

Performance optimization

Cross-functional collaboration

Education

BS/MS in Computer Science

Tools

Temporal.io

ROS/MCAP

Parquet

Apache Arrow

Protobuf

Job description

NVIDIA seeks a Principal Software Engineer to architect and build core platform systems for accelerating Physical AI development, including Autonomous Driving and Robotics. You will own end-to-end areas such as AV/Robotics simulation infrastructure and performance evaluation.

The role requires deep expertise in distributed data systems, Go/Python/Java, and high-performance data formats, with a proven track record delivering scalable, reliable foundations used by multiple teams.