Principal Software Engineer, E2E Performance and Goodput — CSP Engagements

We're looking for a Principal Engineer to join our CSP Engagements team as the technical focal point for end-to-end performance, working directly with engineering teams of key CSP/hyperscale customers to ensure they achieve various performance targets on NVIDIA platforms. In this role, you will augment NVIDIA's performance and benchmark teams with a dedicated CSP-facing focus. You will drive work streams with CSP engineering teams to build shared understanding of platform performance characteristics, gather and incorporate their workload-specific feedback into NVIDIA's optimization priorities, and validate that performance targets are met in customer-representative configurations. Your cross-CSP visibility enables you to identify patterns and drive systemic improvements in documentation, configuration guidance, and tooling. What you'll be doing: • Drive performance characterization work streams with engineering teams of key CSP/hyperscale customers — ensuring they understand platform performance expectations, profiling methodology, and tuning options for their specific workloads • Gather and synthesize CSP performance feedback — identify gaps between expected and actual throughput, and champion optimization priorities back into NVIDIA's CUDA, NCCL, driver, and firmware teams • Ensure key open-source performance and stress tools (e.g., STREAM, GPU Burn, GPU BLAST) are updated and validated for the latest NVIDIA rack-scale systems, GPU architectures, and CPU platforms — so customers and internal teams have reliable baseline measurements from day one • Work closely with CSPs to ensure their own performance and validation tooling reflects the latest GPU capabilities, memory hierarchy changes, and platform-specific tuning parameters • Conduct cross-CSP performance comparison and pattern analysis — identify configuration, software, or workload differences that explain performance gaps between deployments • Collaborate with CSPs to ensure performance-related integration work (profiling infrastructure, benchmark harnesses, config validation) is ready ahead of deployment milestones • Define test strategies and tooling requirements for performance validation — both for NVIDIA internal certification and customer acceptance What we need to see: • 15+ years of experience in systems performance engineering, ideally in GPU/HPC/ML infrastructure. BS or MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience) • Proficiency in GPU workload profiling: nsight systems, nsight compute, DCGM metrics, or equivalent instrumentation • Understanding of distributed training performance dynamics: computation/communication overlap, pipeline bubbles, memory bandwidth utilization, collective efficiency • Statistical methods for performance analysis: regression detection, confidence intervals, A/B comparison at scale • Understanding of how the full software stack impacts performance: driver overhead, collective algorithm selection, memory allocation, scheduling, firmware power management • Strong data analysis and visualization skills (Python, pandas, dashboards). Customer obsession — genuine passion for understanding why customers aren't achieving expected performance and driving solutions • Ability to communicate performance findings to both deep technical audiences and executive leadership • Demonstrated success influencing multiple engineering teams to prioritize performance improvements Ways to stand out from the crowd: • Experience profiling and optimizing distributed training at 1000+ GPU scale (Megatron-LM, DeepSpeed, FSDP) • Background in ML infrastructure performance at a CSP/hyperscaler • Familiarity with NVIDIA platforms (DGX, HGX, NVLink topology) and profiling tools • Experience building automat