Lead Software Engineer – Robotics Platform at Nvidia · Santa…

Lead Software Engineer – Robotics Platform Location: US, CA, Santa Clara NVIDIA's Robotics Platform delivers an end-to-end software and hardware solution driving the future of Physical AI. It supports training foundation models on DGX infrastructure, validating robot behavior through Isaac Sim, and deploying intelligence on robots at the edge via Jetson Thor. As intelligent machines move from labs into factories, hospitals, and warehouses, the Robotics Platform team builds the base software that enables this shift. They fuse simulation, accelerated compute, and real-world deployment into a single development process for robotics developers around the world. In this role, you will lead the development, crafting, and refinement of core platform features. You will influence how developers engage with the platform. You will also build reference integrations, examples, and tools that support developers in bringing physical AI to life. As a lead, you will guide technical work across the Robotics Platform stack and coordinate efforts between our team and other NVIDIA partner teams. What You Will Be Doing: Lead the development of new Robotics Platform runtime features, optimizations, tooling, and developer-facing APIs — with a strong emphasis on performance and reliability. Build clear, comprehensive, and AI agent-ready reference applications, benchmarks, skills, and tutorials showcasing platform capabilities in real-world robotics scenarios. Optimize the platform to best leverage NVIDIA's hardware for sensor I/O processing and physical AI. Coordinate with partner teams (hardware, simulation, AI frameworks, developer relations) to align priorities, resolve dependencies, and ship cohesive platform experiences. Establish and champion engineering guidelines across the team: code quality, testing protocols, performance measurement, observability, and adoption of agentic AI for accelerated development. What We Need to See: MS or PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent experience). 10+ years of software engineering experience with a focus on systems software, robotics, or developer tooling, including technical lead or staff engineering role. Proven experience in developing and shipping robotic products. Proven experience leading or mentoring engineers — setting technical direction, conducting build reviews, and growing team members' capabilities. Strong C++ and Python skills, and ability to work across both application and platform layers of a software stack. Familiarity with robotics concepts including sensor pipelines, real-time execution, and robot application architectures. Strong collaborative approach to working within a fast-paced, multi-team environment. Proficiency using agentic AI tools to accelerate software development and multiply team output. Ways to Stand Out from the Crowd: Hands-on experience building robot applications with ROS2, Holoscan or similar robotics middleware frameworks. Familiarity with Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab, MuJoCo or similar frameworks for simulation and learning-based robot development. Background in observability tooling, distributed tracing, or telemetry for robotics, real-time, or embedded systems. Experience with CUDA, TensorRT, or other NVIDIA technologies. Contributions to open-source robotics projects or developer ecosystem tools. Your base salary will be determined based on your location, experience, and the pay of employees in similar positions. The base salary range is 224,000 USD - 356,500 USD for Level 5, and 272,000 USD - 431,250 USD for Level 6. You will also be eligible for equity and benefits. Applications for this job will be accepted at least until May 4, 2026. This posting is for an existing vacancy. NVIDIA uses AI tools in its recruiting processes. NVIDIA is committed to fostering a diverse 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.