{"id":3645985,"url":"https://alion.io/job/nvidia-principal-engineer-av-simulation-and-evaluation","title":"Principal Engineer - AV Simulation and Evaluation","company":{"id":6,"name":"NVIDIA","domain":"nvidia.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/nvidia","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workday","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":83,"open_postings":823,"ghost_share":0.026,"stale_share":0.599,"repost_share":0.055,"time_to_fill_p50_days":40,"computed_at":"2026-11-07T05:47:08Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Santa Clara, United States","United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":272000,"max":431250,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":431250},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":15,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Computer Vision","optional":false},{"name":"Go","optional":false},{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"Motion Planning","optional":false},{"name":"Physical AI","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"ROS","optional":false},{"name":"Temporal","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-11-02T22:50:39Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-02","last_verified_at":"2026-11-07T23:17:06Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":5,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":5},"description":"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.\nWhat you will be doing:\nDesign and build simulation and evaluation infrastructure used by AV and ML engineers, to accelerate development of Level 4 self-driving capabilities.\nEvolve efficient data formats for AV evaluation: designing for performance, interoperability, and correctness across formats like Protobuf, Arrow, Parquet, and MCAP.\nCollaborate with AI and Robotics teams to deeply understand their simulation and evaluation needs.\nBuild 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.\nOptimize performance at every level: profiling, parallelization, memory efficiency, query optimization, and protocol redesign.\nBuild diagnostic and observability tooling that enables teams to understand and debug their data and test pipelines.\nActively drive the adoption of new standards and technologies in the physical AI tooling ecosystem.\nWhat We Need to See:\nBS or MS in Computer Science (or equivalent experience).\n15+ years of professional experience in software engineering with focus on distributed systems and data-intensive applications.\nProficiency in Go, Python, or Java, and experience operating across the full backend stack.\nDeep experience building high-performance low-latency data systems: binary serialization, efficient data encoding, columnar data formats.\nStrong understanding of distributed systems: concurrency, consistency tradeoffs, latency optimization, and compute-efficient design.\nAbility to identify and fix performance bottlenecks through optimization across the stack, including redesigning protocols and data models.\nExperience designing and implementing workflows across distributed systems.\nPast success building foundational systems that multiple teams depend on, with high reliability and scale.\nCommunication skills to be able to translate nuanced system design to both technical and non-technical partners, and talk to users in their language.\nAbility to lead cross-functional projects, influence without authority, and get work done across organizational boundaries.\nWays to Stand Out from the crowd:\nExperience building orchestration or workflow execution systems (e.g., Temporal.io, similar workflow engines)\nExperience working with sensor data pipelines: ROS, MCAP, AV logs, Parquet, Apache Arrow, or similar domain formats\nUnderstanding of AV & Robotics concepts such as kinematics, control systems, computer vision, motion planning, and/or neural networks\nExperience improving legacy systems through incremental migration, deprecation, and architecture cleanup.\nWidely 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/\nYour 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.\nApplications for this job will be accepted at least until November 6, 2026.This posting is for an existing vacancy.\nNVIDIA uses AI tools in its recruiting processes.\nNVIDIA is committed to fostering an inclusive work environment and proud to be an equal opportunity employer. As we highly value diversity in our current and future employees, we do not discriminate (including in our hiring and promotion practices) on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status or any other characteristic protected by law.","description_format":"text","description_chars":4228,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":15,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Processors, MCUs & AI Chips","Servers & Data Center Hardware","Computer Components","AI Chips & Accelerators"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-11-02T22:50:39Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"adverts_offering_sponsorship_24m":0,"sanctioned_now":false,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 2,856 · green card filings: 799","filings_12m":2856,"filings_prev_12m":1684,"green_card_filings_12m":799,"median_offered_wage_usd":186407,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-11-07T07:57:00+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)","US Department of Labor: PERM disclosure data (green cards)"],"filings_for_role_12m":1253}],"liveness":{"score":63,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.632,"p_room":1,"age_days":4,"expected_fill_days":40,"reasons":["conf:3","stale_co","velocity","win:early","comp:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-11-07T05:47:08Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":431250,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/nvidia-principal-engineer-av-simulation-and-evaluation","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/nvidia-principal-engineer-av-simulation-and-evaluation.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-08T05:07:44Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":11120,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-09T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":6},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=6"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fnvidia-principal-engineer-av-simulation-and-evaluation"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fnvidia-principal-engineer-av-simulation-and-evaluation"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fnvidia-principal-engineer-av-simulation-and-evaluation"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/nvidia-principal-engineer-av-simulation-and-evaluation\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fnvidia-principal-engineer-av-simulation-and-evaluation"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":3645985}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"nvidia.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":3645985},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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