Principal Software Engineer - Physical AI Tooling

NVIDIA • Santa Clara, CA

3d

About The Position

We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to architect and build core platform systems for the TestStudio team to accelerate Physical AI development, such as for Autonomous Driving & Robotics. This is a deeply technical role for someone with expertise at the intersection of distributed systems, data visualization, and Robotics across cloud, local, and on-road environments. You will own deep technical areas end-to-end: such as efficient binary data pipelines, streaming APIs to visualization backends, AI model validation and simulation infrastructure.

Requirements

• BS or MS in Computer Science or relevant field (or equivalent experience).
• 15+ years of professional experience in software engineering with a strong focus on distributed backend systems and data-intensive applications.
• Deep proficiency in Go, Python, or Java — and experience operating across the full backend stack.
• Deep experience building high-performance low-latency data systems: streaming pipelines, binary serialization, efficient data encoding, or columnar data formats.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems: concurrency, consistency tradeoffs, latency optimization, and resource-efficient design.
• Ability to identify and fix performance bottlenecks — through optimization across the stack, including protocol redesign.
• Experience designing and implementing internal platform APIs used broadly across engineering organizations.
• Track record of building foundational systems that teams depend on — with the engineering quality to match.
• Ability to work with multi-functional teams, principals, and architects across organizational boundaries and geographies.
• Excellent communication: able to translate nuanced system design to both technical and non-technical partners.

Nice To Haves

• Understanding of AV & Robotics concepts such as kinematics, control systems, computer vision, motion planning, and/or neural networks.
• Experience working with sensor data pipelines: ROS, MCAP, AV logs, Parquet, or similar domain formats.
• Experience with real-time and replay streaming architectures (gRPC, WebSocket).
• Experience building data visualization or data browser tooling for ML/AI teams.
• Frontend experience (TypeScript, React) for building internal data tooling UIs.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement high-performance data services for streaming, indexing, and querying sensor data at scale — across time-series, multi-modal, replay, and live sources.
• Own and evolve the serialization and format layer: designing for performance, interoperability, and correctness across formats like Protobuf, Arrow, Parquet, and MCAP.
• Collaborate with AI and Robotics teams to deeply understand their data access and evaluation patterns, then build platform APIs and tooling that measurably accelerate their work.
• Optimize performance at every level: profiling, parallelization, memory efficiency, query optimization, and protocol redesign.
• Build diagnostic and observability tooling that lets teams understand and debug their data and test pipelines.
• Establish standard software development practices (code quality, testing, tracing, CI/CD) across data and orchestration services.
• Actively drive the adoption of new standards and technologies in the physical AI tooling ecosystem.

Benefits

• You will also be eligible for equity and benefits.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal