Principal Performance Engineer, CSP Engagements

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

Job summary

NVIDIA Corporation is seeking a Principal Engineer to join the CSP Engagements team as the technical focal point for end‑to‑end performance. You will work directly with CSP engineering teams to ensure they achieve performance targets on NVIDIA platforms and drive improvements in documentation, configuration guidance, and tooling.

You will lead performance characterization with CSPs, gather workload feedback, and validate performance in customer configurations, influencing CUDA, NCCL, drivers,

Qualifications

• 15+ years of experience in systems performance engineering, ideally in GPU/HPC/ML infrastructure.
• BS or MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience).
• Proficiency in GPU workload profiling: nsight systems, nsight compute, DCGM metrics, or equivalent instrumentation.
• Understanding of distributed training performance dynamics: computation/communication overlap, pipeline bubbles, memory bandwidth utilization.
• Statistical methods for performance analysis: regression detection, confidence intervals, A/B comparison at scale.
• Understanding of how the full software stack impacts performance: driver overhead, collective algorithm selection, memory allocation, scheduling, firmware power management.
• Strong data analysis and visualization skills (Python, pandas, dashboards).
• Customer obsession — genuine passion for understanding why customers aren't achieving expected performance and driving solutions.
• Ability to communicate performance findings to both deep technical audiences and executive leadership.
• Demonstrated success influencing multiple engineering teams to prioritize performance improvements.

Responsibilities

• Drive performance characterization work streams with engineering teams of key CSP/hyperscale customers — ensuring they understand platform performance expectations, profiling methodology, and tuning options for their specific workloads
• Gather and synthesize CSP performance feedback — identify gaps between expected and actual throughput, and champion optimization priorities back into NVIDIA's CUDA, NCCL, driver, and firmware teams
• Ensure key open-source performance and stress tools (e.g., STREAM, GPU Burn, GPU BLAST) are updated and validated for the latest NVIDIA rack‑scale systems, GPU architectures, and CPU platforms — so customers and internal teams have reliable baseline measurements from day one
• Work closely with CSPs to ensure their own performance and validation tooling reflects the latest GPU capabilities, memory hierarchy changes, and platform‑specific tuning parameters
• Conduct cross‑CSP performance comparison and pattern analysis — identify configuration, software, or workload differences that explain performance gaps between deployments
• Collaborate with CSPs to ensure performance‑related integration work (profiling infrastructure, benchmark harnesses, config validation) is ready ahead of deployment milestones
• Define test strategies and tooling requirements for performance validation — both for NVIDIA internal certification and customer acceptance

Skills

Performance engineering

GPU performance

Nsight profiling

Distributed training

Python data analysis

Executive communication

Education

BS/MS in CS/CE

Tools

Nsight systems

Nsight compute

DCGM metrics

Profiling tools

Job description

NVIDIA Corporation is seeking a Principal Engineer to join the CSP Engagements team as the technical focal point for end‑to‑end performance. You will work directly with CSP engineering teams to ensure they achieve performance targets on NVIDIA platforms and drive improvements in documentation, configuration guidance, and tooling.

You will lead performance characterization with CSPs, gather workload feedback, and validate performance in customer configurations, influencing CUDA, NCCL, drivers,