Principal Engineer - AV Simulation and Evaluation

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

Job summary

NVIDIA seeks a Principal Software Engineer to architect and build core platform systems for Physical AI, including AV and robotics simulation infrastructure. You will own end-to-end areas such as AV performance evaluation, data pipelines, and high-performance data formats, collaborating with AI and Robotics teams across cloud, edge, and on-road environments.

You will design scalable, low-latency backends, optimize protocols, and build observability tooling to support hundreds of millions of runs

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 translate system design to technical and non-technical partners.
• Ability to lead cross-functional projects and work across organizational boundaries.

Responsibilities

• Design and build simulation and evaluation infrastructure used by AV and ML engineers.
• Evolve efficient data formats for AV evaluation across Protobuf, Arrow, Parquet, and MCAP.
• Collaborate with AI and Robotics teams to understand simulation and evaluation needs.
• Build reliable services, APIs, data pipelines, and AV simulation workflows at massive scale.
• Optimize performance through profiling, parallelization, memory efficiency, and protocol redesign.
• Develop diagnostics and observability tooling for data and test pipelines.
• Drive adoption of new standards and technologies in the physical AI tooling ecosystem.

Skills

Go

Python

Java

Distributed systems

Low-latency data

Data pipelines

Columnar formats

Education

BS or MS in Computer Science (or equivalent experience)

Tools

Protobuf

Apache Arrow

Parquet

MCAP

ROS

Temporal.io

Job description

We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to architect and build core platform systems to accelerate Physical AI development, such as Autonomous Driving (AV) & Robotics. This is a technical role for someone with expertise at the intersection of data architecture, distributed systems, and Autonomous Vehicle development across cloud, local, and on-road environments. You will own deep technical areas end-to-end: such as AV/Robotics simulation infrastructure and AV performance evaluation.

What you will be doing:

• 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.

What We Need to See:

• 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.

Ways to Stand Out from the crowd:

• Experience building orchestration or workflow execution systems (e.g., Temporal.io, similar workflow engines)
• Experience working with sensor data pipelines: ROS, MCAP, AV logs, Parquet, Apache Arrow, or similar domain formats
• Understanding of AV & Robotics concepts such as kinematics, control systems, computer vision, motion planning, and/or neural networks
• Experience improving legacy systems through incremental migration, deprecation, and architecture cleanup.

Widely considered to be one of the technology world's most desirable employers, NVIDIA offers highly competitive salaries and a comprehensive benefits package. As you plan your future, see what we can offer to you and your family www.nvidiabenefits.com/

Your base salary will be determined based on your location, experience, and other objective job-related factors. The expected base salary range for this position is 272,000 USD - 431,250 USD.

You will also be eligible for equity and benefits.

Applications for this job will be accepted at least until November 6, 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.