Senior Manager, Software Engineering - RL Post-Training Frameworks

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

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Benefits

Job summary

NVIDIA seeks a Senior Software Engineering Manager to lead RL post-training frameworks strategy, working with researchers and engineers across teams. You will prioritize investments, drive architecture, and ensure high-quality upstream contributions across VeRL, Miles, Slime, SkyRL, TorchTitan, and related stacks.

You will also recruit and mentor managers and senior ICs, shaping a US/APAC operating model and setting measurable goals.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience in distributed systems, AI frameworks, ML infrastructure, HPC, or systems software.
• 4+ years as an engineering manager for software teams.
• Ability to reason across training, inference, orchestration, and end-to-end performance.
• Experience defining technical strategy and multi-team execution plans.
• Ability to influence across organizations and communicate tradeoffs to executives.
• Experience hiring and developing engineering leaders and staff plans.
• Experience establishing workflows, metrics, and decision gates to improve execution.
• Background collaborating with open-source communities, research teams, or partners.

Responsibilities

• Own RL post-training frameworks strategy, investments, and prioritization.
• Translate signals into clear engineering priorities and execution plans.
• Lead benchmarking, reproducibility criteria, and upstream collaborations.
• Build and lead a US/APAC team with clear ownership and decisions.

Skills

Distributed systems

AI frameworks

ML infrastructure

High-performance computing

Engineering leadership

cross-organizational collaboration

system architecture

performance optimization

Education

MS or PhD in CS/CE or related field

Tools

Ray

Kubernetes

Slurm

Megatron-Core

Job description

Job Requisition ID

JR2024140

Job Category

Engineering

Time Type

Full time

Can you bring together globally distributed teams and the systems they build into a production-quality reinforcement learning ecosystem for researchers and model builders? Reinforcement learning post-training is where modern AI systems learn to reason, use tools, follow detailed instructions, and act as agents. Making that capability work at scale creates one of the most demanding systems problems in AI: a single RL run ties together inference, rollout, reward and critic evaluation, and training. At frontier scale, these loops have to run reliably across GPUs, CPUs, networking, storage, and open-source runtimes. You will lead the work to build, extend, and harden the rapidly evolving pieces to compose cleanly and scale with the most ambitious RL projects on NVIDIA's platforms.

To meet that challenge, NVIDIA is building an RL Frameworks engineering team for the open-source tools and infrastructure that researchers, model builders, and external partners depend on. We are looking for a Senior Software Engineering Manager to set strategy, build the team, and convert emerging technical, customer, and partner signals into clear engineering priorities. The role spans RL frameworks such as VeRL, Miles, Slime, SkyRL, TorchTitan, and related post-training stacks, along with the systems those stacks build on and compose with: Megatron-Core, Ray, Monarch, NIXL, SGLang, Kubernetes, and NVIDIA platform libraries. Come build the ecosystem that the next generation of AI will rely on!

What You Will Be Doing

You will own NVIDIA's RL post-training frameworks strategy: where we invest directly, where we partner upstream, and how we prioritize based on customer impact, ecosystem leverage, technical feasibility, and opportunity cost. This is senior technical leadership work: using systems depth to evaluate architecture and performance claims across training, inference, rollout, orchestration, and the NVIDIA platform. You will help expert teams converge on integrations that improve RL framework quality and user value, then turn those decisions into measurable execution plans. The work includes benchmarking and reproducibility criteria, delivery across open-source frameworks and distributed runtimes, and close partnership with product management, research, DevRel, customer-facing teams, hardware, CUDA, networking, math libraries, compilers, and external open-source collaborators.

You will also build the team: recruiting and developing managers and senior ICs, creating an effective US/APAC operating model, reviewing capacity against commitments, and setting clear ownership and decision rights. You will coach engineers to contribute credibly in open-source ecosystems and carry NVIDIA's priorities through high-quality upstream work. Because the technical work crosses organizations by design, you will turn open technical and partner questions into concrete and measurable action, set delivery goals, and hold the quality bar. Success means validated, valuable work rather than work that merely lands, plus durable open-source improvements that make RL workloads run well on NVIDIA systems.

What We Need To See

• MS or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience)
• 10+ years of software engineering experience in distributed systems, AI frameworks, ML infrastructure, high-performance computing, or systems software, with 4+ years as an engineering manager for software teams
• Strong technical background in distributed AI systems, including the ability to reason across training, inference, orchestration, and end-to-end performance, and challenge architecture and performance tradeoffs with senior engineers
• Experience defining domain-level technical strategy, making build-vs-buy or upstream-vs-internal investment decisions, and creating multi-team execution plans
• Ability to drive engineering work across organizational boundaries, influence without direct authority, and communicate tradeoffs clearly to senior leaders and executives
• Experience hiring and leading engineering teams, developing technical leaders or new managers, and creating staffing plans for constantly evolving technical domains
• Experience establishing workflows, success criteria, metrics, or decision gates that improve engineering execution across teams
• Background collaborating with open-source communities, research teams, external partners, or customer-facing teams

Ways To Stand Out From The Crowd

• Hands-on experience with RL post-training frameworks or algorithms such as RLHF, PPO, GRPO, DPO, reward modeling, VeRL, Miles, Slime, SkyRL, OpenRLHF, NeMo-Aligner, or TorchTitan
• Background with runtime and orchestration systems such as Ray, Monarch, Kubernetes, Slurm, or comparable actor- and task-based systems
• Experience scaling workloads across thousands of GPUs or heterogeneous systems, including fault tolerance, elastic recovery, stragglers, resource contention, or benchmark reproducibility
• Familiarity with NVIDIA platform components such as CUDA, NCCL, cuDNN, TensorRT-LLM, Transformer Engine, Nsight, NeMo, or Megatron-Core
• Demonstrated ability to turn customer or partner needs into reusable upstream improvements rather than one-off support

Your base salary will be determined based on your location, experience, and the pay of employees in similar positions. The base salary range 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 August 29, 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.