Senior Research Engineer - AI Coding Tools

Nvidia Corporation; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 224,000 - 431,250; Full time

Job summary

Nvidia Corporation is seeking a Senior Research Engineer to join their Research team in Santa Clara, California. This role focuses on developing AI coding tools, building and improving novel coding agents to enhance CUDA development. Candidates should have 12+ years of experience in applied AI/ML with a strong proficiency in Python and practical experience with LLMs. Nvidia offers a competitive salary range from $224,000 to $356,500, equity, and various benefits. Applications are accepted until at least May 4, 2026.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of industry experience in applied AI/ML.
• Strong proficiency in Python and sound software engineering practices.
• Experience with fine-tuning or evaluating LLMs.

Responsibilities

• Build and improve AI coding agents for CUDA code.
• Design evaluations to measure AI-powered development.
• Collaborate to turn prototypes into shipping features.

Skills

Python

AI/ML experience

Software engineering practices

Hands-on experience with LLMs

Collaboration

Education

B.S. in Computer Science or related technical field

Tools

CUDA

Nsight Compute

Nsight Systems

Job description

NVIDIA's AI Developer Tools organization is seeking a Senior Research Engineer to join our Research team, where we build the AI coding agents, models, datasets, and evaluations at the heart of NVIDIA's strategy to put AI-powered coding tools in the hands of every CUDA developer.

Responsibilities

• Build and improve novel coding agents that help NVIDIA developers write, optimize, and maintain CUDA code - and that work alongside other AI agents in the developer's workflow
• Design and ship evaluations, including extensions of our public ComputeEval benchmark, that measure what really matters in AI-powered CUDA development
• Fine-tune and specialize code LLMs, and partner with the Nemotron team on the datasets and evaluations that feed NVIDIA's foundation models
• Develop Agent Skills, MCP servers, and other tool-use interfaces that make NVIDIA's developer tools (Nsight Compute, Nsight Systems, and more) first-class for AI agents
• Generate, curate, and validate synthetic training and evaluation data for CUDA programming
• Deliver "net new knowledge" to frontier LLMs through RAG and skill-based systems that keep models current with NVIDIA's fast-moving software stack
• Collaborate with partner product teams to turn research prototypes into shipping features used inside NVIDIA and by external customers

Qualifications

• B.S. in Computer Science or related technical field or equivalent experience (M.S. or Ph.D. a plus)
• 12+ years of industry experience in applied AI/ML, with meaningful recent work in the AI-for-code space - coding agents, code LLMs, AI developer tools, or adjacent systems
• Strong proficiency in Python and sound software engineering practices
• Hands-on experience fine-tuning or evaluating LLMs, with appropriate humility about the complexity of training and data work
• Fluency with the systems side of LLM-powered agents, including practical concerns like context management, prompt caching, tool-use design, MCP, and Agent Skills
• Experience designing or contributing to rigorous evaluations for code generation or agentic systems
• Track record of shipping - taking work past the prototype stage and into the hands of real users
• Comfortable in a small, collaborative, in-person team with fast direction changes and little process overhead

Preferred Qualifications

• Public contributions in the AI-for-code space - open-source agents or tools, widely-used benchmarks, influential papers, or blog posts with demonstrated real-world impact
• Experience building coding agents or code LLMs that real users rely on every day
• Familiarity with CUDA or other GPU programming, and/or with NVIDIA profiling tools (Nsight Compute, Nsight Systems) and libraries (cuDNN, cuBLAS, Thrust, CUB)
• Experience with synthetic data generation and quality validation for code
• Track record of zero-to-one product work, or work inside a recently-rebooted org with a strong mandate and customer pull

Compensation and Benefits

Your base salary will be determined based on your location, experience, and the pay of employees in similar positions. The base salary range is 224,000 USD - 356,500 USD for Level 5, and 272,000 USD - 431,250 USD for Level 6. You will also be eligible for equity and benefits.

Applications for this job will be accepted at least until May 4, 2026.

NVIDIA is committed to fostering a diverse 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.