Principal Systems AI Engineer — Semiconductor Inspection

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

Job summary

NVIDIA is seeking a Principal Systems Software Engineer for Semiconductor Systems Inspection in Santa Clara. Lead the creation of AI-powered inspection tools, spanning defect detection, classification, and workflow integration, with cross-disciplinary collaboration across CV, ML, and hardware teams.

You will drive research into production-ready solutions, optimize for edge deployment, and align with fab constraints and data quality challenges. Strong leadership and communication are essential.

Qualifications

• MS or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related technical field, or equivalent experience.
• 15+ years in systems design, architecture, and software development.
• 4+ years in deep learning, machine learning, computer vision, or applied AI.

Responsibilities

• Define and prototype AI system architectures for defect inspection across optical and e-beam inspection, wafer and mask inspection, metrology, and defect-review workflows.
• Advance WFM capabilities for semiconductor inspection, including multimodal representation learning, model adaptation, domain transfer, and data-scarce defect understanding.
• Partner with customers and internal teams to integrate and improve computer vision and multimodal workflows for defect detection, classification, localization, segmentation, nuisance filtering, ADC, and ADR.
• Design agentic inspection flows for air-gapped fab environments that connect data triage, model inference, review assistance, root-cause analysis, human approval, and secure deployment constraints.
• Apply semiconductor metrology, inspection, review, and process context-including CD, LER, LWR, overlay, wafer maps, defect maps, SPC signals, and yield signals—to improve model quality and fab decision support.
• Address noisy, limited, and shifting fab data through tool-to-tool calibration, domain-shift mitigation, synthetic defect generation, noise simulation, and augmentation.
• Turn research into customer-ready semiconductor inspection products with clear approaches to evaluation, failure analysis, monitoring, optimization, and production deployment.
• Work with research, software, process, metrology, inspection, review, and hardware teams to set priorities for next-generation semiconductor AI inspection systems.

Skills

Python

Deep learning

Computer vision

Multimodal AI

Leadership

Education

MS or PhD in CS/EE/CE or related field

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

TensorRT

CUDA

cuDNN

Triton

Job description

NVIDIA is seeking a Principal Systems Software Engineer for Semiconductor Systems Inspection in Santa Clara. Lead the creation of AI-powered inspection tools, spanning defect detection, classification, and workflow integration, with cross-disciplinary collaboration across CV, ML, and hardware teams.

You will drive research into production-ready solutions, optimize for edge deployment, and align with fab constraints and data quality challenges. Strong leadership and communication are essential.