Principal Software Engineer, Performance

Who We Are 

Nuro believes self-driving vehicles are the most immediate and profound opportunity for AI to drive positive change in the physical world. Safer streets, more time for what matters, and easier access to the world around us, that’s why we’re building a universal autonomy platform: self-driving for all roads and all rides.

Founded in 2016, Nuro is a physical AI company developing Level 4 autonomous driving technology for a wide range of vehicles, use cases, and markets. Powered by the Nuro Driver™, our universal autonomy platform enables the global mobility ecosystem to deploy autonomy at scale, from robotaxis and logistics fleets to personal vehicles.

With years of real-world deployment experience and a flexible, partner-led business model, Nuro is working toward a future where millions of autonomous vehicles powered by our technology help make everyday life safer, easier, and more connected.

Nuro has raised over $2B in capital from Uber, NVIDIA, Google, Softbank, Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, and other leading investors.

About the Role

As a Principal Technical Lead on Onboard Performance, you will help define and build the high-performance, highly reliable foundation of the Nuro Driver. This role requires deep technical leadership across sensor and compute integration, onboard runtime systems, distributed execution, and autonomy software performance.

You will architect hardware-agnostic device interfaces, inter-device communication pipelines, runtime APIs, and onboard software platforms that enable Nuro’s autonomy stack to run safely and efficiently across current and future vehicle platforms. You will also lead system-wide performance and reliability efforts, including latency reduction, resource efficiency, observability, automated validation, and tooling for debugging complex onboard systems.

This is a highly cross-functional and high-impact role. You will partner with autonomy, hardware, safety, validation, operations, and supplier-facing teams to integrate next-generation sensors and compute platforms, resolve reliability and performance issues, and shape the long-term technical direction of Nuro’s onboard infrastructure. We are looking for a technical leader who can operate across team boundaries, align multiple stakeholders, mentor engineers, and deliver robust systems for safety-critical autonomous vehicles.

About the Work

• 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 across current and future vehicle platforms.
• Lead system-level performance and reliability efforts, including latency reduction, resource efficiency, memory management, thread/process lifecycle management, observability, automated testing, and continuous validation.
• Build foundational libraries, APIs, tools, and frameworks that enable autonomy and infrastructure teams to develop reliable, low-latency, high-performance software.
• Develop onboard distributed systems, including high-performance communication between compute nodes, module orchestration, monitoring, logging, diagnostics, and large-scale autonomy/sensor data pipelines.
• Diagnose complex, hard-to-reproduce failures across software, hardware, sensors, compute, networking, and autonomy workloads; drive root cause, mitigation, and long-term prevention.
• Partner with autonomy, hardware, safety, validation, operations, and suppliers to define requirements, evaluate and integrate next-generation platforms, and ensure safe, reliable deployment.
• Translate ambiguous product, safety, and autonomy needs into scalable technical architecture; align teams on design direction, execution plans, interfaces, and long-term platform strategy.
• Mentor engineers, establish engineering best practices, and raise the technical bar across Onboard Infrastructure and partner teams.

About You

• Master’s degree or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Robotics, or related field.
• 9+ years of software engineering experience building production-quality systems software.
• 5+ years of technical leadership experience, including leading complex projects, setting technical direction, and driving cross-team alignment.
• Strong proficiency in modern C++, with deep experience in concurrency, multi-threading, debugging, memory management, and performance optimization.
• Experience building reliable, high-performance software for robotics, embedded systems, autonomous systems, distributed systems, or other performance-critical platforms.
• Strong systems-level expertise, with the ability to reason across operating systems, device interfaces, runtime frameworks, and application-level 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 through design and execution.
• Exceptional technical communication and stakeholder management skills, with the verified ability to influence senior technical leadership, cross-functional partners, and external vendors on high-impact architectural decisions.

Bonus Points

• Experience with robotics hardware, sensors, embedded compute platforms, or autonomous vehicle systems.
• Deep knowledge of Linux, device drivers, computer architecture, kernel behavior, and communication protocols such as Ethernet, PCIe, USB, SPI, I2C, or UART.
• Experience with high-performance communication, IPC, networking stacks, logging, monitoring, diagnostics, or data collection systems.
• Experience with GPU programming, NVIDIA platforms, CUDA, image processing, machine learning infrastructure, or accelerated compute.
• Experience working with hardware suppliers or integrating next-generation sensor and compute platforms.

At Nuro, your base pay is one part of your total compensation package. For this position, the reasonably expected base pay range is between $258,080 and $387,370 for the level at which this job has been scoped. Your base pay will depend on several factors, including your experience, qualifications, education, location, and skills. In the event that you are considered for a different level, a higher or lower pay range would apply. This position is also eligible for an annual performance bonus, equity, and a competitive benefits package.

At Nuro, we celebrate differences and are committed to a diverse workplace that fosters inclusion and psychological safety for all employees. Nuro is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and expressly prohibits any form of workplace discrimination based on race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristics.