Principal Engineer - AV Simulation and Evaluation

We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to architect and build core platform systems to accelerate Physical AI development, such as Autonomous Driving (AV) & Robotics. This is a technical role for someone with expertise at the intersection of data architecture, distributed systems, and Autonomous Vehicle development across cloud, local, and on-road environments. You will own deep technical areas end-to-end: such as AV/Robotics simulation infrastructure and AV performance evaluation. What you will be doing: • Design and build simulation and evaluation infrastructure used by AV and ML engineers, to accelerate development of Level 4 self-driving capabilities. • Evolve efficient data formats for AV evaluation: designing for performance, interoperability, and correctness across formats like Protobuf, Arrow, Parquet, and MCAP. • Collaborate with AI and Robotics teams to deeply understand their simulation and evaluation needs. • Build reliable services, APIs, data pipelines, and AV simulation and evaluation workflows and framework that operate at the scale of hundreds of millions of runs per day. • Optimize performance at every level: profiling, parallelization, memory efficiency, query optimization, and protocol redesign. • Build diagnostic and observability tooling that enables teams to understand and debug their data and test pipelines. • Actively drive the adoption of new standards and technologies in the physical AI tooling ecosystem. What We Need to See: • BS or MS in Computer Science (or equivalent experience). • 15+ years of professional experience in software engineering with focus on distributed systems and data-intensive applications. • Proficiency in Go, Python, or Java, and experience operating across the full backend stack. • Deep experience building high-performance low-latency data systems: binary serialization, efficient data encoding, columnar data formats. • Strong understanding of distributed systems: concurrency, consistency tradeoffs, latency optimization, and compute-efficient design. • Ability to identify and fix performance bottlenecks through optimization across the stack, including redesigning protocols and data models. • Experience designing and implementing workflows across distributed systems. • Past success building foundational systems that multiple teams depend on, with high reliability and scale. • Communication skills to be able to translate nuanced system design to both technical and non-technical partners, and talk to users in their language. • Ability to lead cross-functional projects, influence without authority, and get work done across organizational boundaries. Ways to Stand Out from the crowd: • Experience building orchestration or workflow execution systems (e.g., Temporal.io, similar workflow engines) • Experience working with sensor data pipelines: ROS, MCAP, AV logs, Parquet, Apache Arrow, or similar domain formats • Understanding of AV & Robotics concepts such as kinematics, control systems, computer vision, motion planning, and/or neural networks • Experience improving legacy systems through incremental migration, deprecation, and architecture cleanup. Widely considered to be one of the technology world’s most desirable employers, NVIDIA offers highly competitive salaries and a comprehensive benefits package. As you plan your future, see what we can offer to you and your family www.nvidiabenefits.com/ Your base salary will be determined based on your location, experience, and other objective job-related factors. The expected base salary range for this position 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 November 6, 2026. This posting is for an existing vacancy.  N