Staff Performance Engineer – Onboard Systems

Nuro; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 258,000 - 387,000; Full time

Job summary

Nuro seeks a Staff / Senior Staff Technical Lead for Onboard Performance to shape the Nuro Driver's foundation. You will drive hardware-software integration, runtime systems, and autonomy performance across vehicle platforms.

You will mentor engineers, define scalable architecture, and partner with autonomy, hardware, safety, and validation teams to deliver safe, high-performance onboard infrastructure for autonomous vehicles.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience building production-quality systems software.
• 5+ years of technical leadership experience, including leading complex projects and cross-team alignment.
• Strong proficiency in modern C++, with concurrency, multi-threading, debugging, memory management, and performance optimization.
• Experience building reliable, high-performance software for robotics, embedded systems, autonomous systems, or other performance-critical platforms.
• Strong systems-level expertise across OS, device interfaces, runtime frameworks, and application workloads.
• Proven ability to diagnose complex performance, reliability, concurrency, and hardware/software integration issues.
• Ability to translate ambiguous requirements into scalable architecture and mentor engineers.
• Exceptional technical communication and stakeholder management skills.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive technical direction for Nuro’s onboard infrastructure across Device Platform, Performance, and Onboard Systems.
• Architect core onboard systems for embedded compute, sensor integration, runtime frameworks, inter-device communication, and distributed execution.
• Lead system-level performance and reliability efforts including latency reduction, resource efficiency, memory management, and observability.
• Build foundational libraries, APIs, tools, and frameworks for autonomy and infrastructure teams.
• Develop onboard distributed systems, including high-performance inter-node communication, module orchestration, monitoring, and diagnostics.
• Diagnose complex failures across software, hardware, sensors, compute, networking, and autonomy workloads; drive root-cause analysis and prevention.
• Partner with autonomy, hardware, safety, validation, operations, and suppliers to integrate next-gen platforms.
• Translate product and autonomy needs into scalable architecture; align teams on design direction and interfaces.
• Mentor engineers, establish engineering best practices, and raise the technical bar across Onboard Infrastructure.

Skills

C++ concurrency

Multi-threading

Memory management

Performance optimization

Robotics software

Distributed systems

Linux systems

Engineering leadership

Stakeholder management

Technical communication

Education

Master’s or PhD in Computer Science / Electrical Engineering / Robotics

Job description

Nuro seeks a Staff / Senior Staff Technical Lead for Onboard Performance to shape the Nuro Driver's foundation. You will drive hardware-software integration, runtime systems, and autonomy performance across vehicle platforms.

You will mentor engineers, define scalable architecture, and partner with autonomy, hardware, safety, and validation teams to deliver safe, high-performance onboard infrastructure for autonomous vehicles.