Developer Relations Manager, Federal Government

About the role

The Developer Relations Manager will lead technical engagement efforts across the U.S. defense autonomy ecosystem. Key responsibilities include building and maintaining deep technical expertise in autonomous drone mission workloads, embedding with federal autonomy ISVs, drone OEMs, and prime contractors, and leading partner engineering teams through onboarding and integration.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain deep technical expertise in autonomous drone mission workloads, including visual-inertial odometry and SLAM in GPS-denied environments, multi-modal sensor fusion, onboard target detection and tracking, swarm and teaming behaviors, and mission-level planning under degraded communications.
• Embed with federal autonomy ISVs, drone OEMs, and prime contractors to architect, prototype, and integrate the NVIDIA software stack—Jetson, Holoscan, Isaac ROS, TensorRT, DeepStream, and cuOpt—into flight-ready autonomy pipelines optimized for SWaP-constrained airframes.
• Lead partner engineering teams through onboarding and integration. Deliver reference architectures, optimized perception and planning pipelines, sample code, and production-grade autonomy workflows deployable on Group 1–5 platforms.
• Observe the autonomy ecosystem to spot new opportunities in collaborative combat aircraft, loitering munitions, counter-UAS, ISR, and human-machine teaming. Provide insights to NVIDIA engineering and product teams to guide roadmaps for Jetson Thor, Isaac, and Holoscan.
• Engage senior technical leaders—including Chief Architects, CTOs, and autonomy platform leads—across the Aerospace & Defense sector. Tackle sophisticated architectural challenges such as deterministic edge processing, certification-ready software stacks, and safe autonomy at mission scale.
• Run technical workshops, hackathons, and hands-on enablement programs that rapidly onboard autonomy engineers to the NVIDIA stack.
• Partner with NVIDIA Account Managers, industry business development leaders, Solutions Architects, and federal system integrators supporting major autonomy programs, including Replicator, CCA, NGAD, and broader Joint Force initiatives.
• Support development of AI blueprints and reference builds for autonomous systems, spanning synthetic data generation in Isaac Sim and Omniverse through on-platform inference and fleet-level mission analytics.

Requirements

Requirements include a Bachelor's or Master's (or equivalent experience) in Computer Science, Robotics, Aerospace/Controls, Electrical Engineering, or a related field. 15+ years in the technology industry overall, with 7+ years hands-on in robotics, autonomy, flight software, perception, or edge AI — ideally including time at a defense autonomy company, drone OEM, or an autonomy-heavy program office. Proven technical depth in GPU-accelerated autonomy software: CUDA, TensorRT, Isaac ROS / ROS 2, Holoscan, DeepStream, and on-device model optimization for Jetson-class hardware. Proven experience in architecting real-time perception, sensor fusion, and planning stacks for SWaP-constrained airborne platforms. History of leading developer programs, reference integrations, or ecosystem partnerships with defense ISVs, primes, or venture-backed autonomy companies. Strong ability to translate between engineering depth and senior-executive strategy across program offices, primes, and mission owners.

Qualifications

Qualifications include a U.S. Citizenship. Active clearance (Secret or above) or eligibility to acquire one.

Skills

Skills required include direct experience shipping autonomy software on a Group 2–5 UAS, a loitering munition, a counter-UAS system, or a coordinated strike aircraft. Background in multi-agent / swarm autonomy, behavior trees, or mission-level AI planners. Experience with synthetic data pipelines, sim-to-real, or digital twin workflows for training and validating perception and policy models. Familiarity with DoD software acquisition pathways, cATO/RMF, and the realities of deploying AI on classified networks and tactical edge hardware.

Benefits

Benefits include competitive salaries and a generous benefits package. Applications for this job will be accepted at least until May 2, 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.