Developer Relations Manager, Higher Education and Research - Foundational AI

We are seeking a mission-driven Developer Relations Manager focused on Foundational AI Research to engage leading academic labs advancing the next generation of AI models, systems, and methods. In this role, you will work directly with top researchers building frontier AI systems, including large language models, multimodal models, reasoning systems, training methods, inference systems, model serving, and scalable AI infrastructure. You will help researchers adopt NVIDIA’s AI and accelerated computing platforms to push the boundaries of model performance, efficiency, and scale. The ideal candidate brings deep technical credibility in foundational AI, strong research engagement experience, and hands-on expertise in either AI inference research or AI training research. What you'll be doing: • Serve as a trusted technical advisor to leading academic AI labs working on foundation models, LLMs, multimodal AI, reasoning, training, inference, and AI systems. • Identify high-impact research workloads where NVIDIA software, systems, and accelerated computing platforms can advance model performance, scale, and efficiency. • Engage principal investigators, postdocs, graduate researchers, and lab leadership to understand research goals, technical blockers, infrastructure needs, and collaboration opportunities. • Track frontier AI research across papers, benchmarks, open-source projects, and academic labs to identify emerging trends and future platform opportunities. • Partner with Research Account Managers, Solution Architects, Product, Engineering, and Business Development teams to support researcher adoption and long-term engagement. • Represent researcher needs internally by translating academic feedback into actionable insights for product roadmaps, developer programs, education, and platform strategy. • Support NVIDIA participation in major AI, ML, and systems research venues through technical content, workshops, university engagements, and lab-facing programs. What we need to see: • PhD in Computer Science, AI, Machine Learning, Applied Mathematics, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent research experience. • 5+ years of experience in the technology industry across software engineering, developer relations, technical partnerships, solutions architecture, or product management, including 3+ years of hands-on experience in AI. • Deep expertise in foundational AI, including LLMs, multimodal models, generative AI, reasoning, post-training, model evaluation, or AI systems research. • Strong understanding of modern AI model development across the lifecycle, including pretraining, fine-tuning, post-training, optimization, evaluation, deployment, and model serving. • Hands-on experience with AI research stacks such as PyTorch, JAX, distributed training frameworks, inference systems, model serving platforms, evaluation pipelines, and GPU-accelerated workflows. • Technical fluency in scalable AI systems, including distributed training, parallelism strategies, checkpointing, memory optimization, batching, scheduling, latency, throughput, and cost-performance tradeoffs. • Familiarity with methods that improve model efficiency and performance, such as quantization, distillation, sparsity, speculative decoding, attention optimization, synthetic data generation, RLHF/RLAIF, and preference optimization. • Ability to engage top academic labs on frontier research challenges, including scaling behavior, compute efficiency, model quality, benchmark methodology, reproducibility, reliability, and research impact. • Demonstrated research credibility through publications, open-source contributions, academic collaborations, technical leadership, or direct work on frontier AI systems. Ways to stand out from the cr