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 technical expertise in autonomous drone mission workloads, embedding with federal autonomy ISVs, drone OEMs, and prime contractors, leading partner engineering teams, observing the autonomy ecosystem, providing insights to NVIDIA engineering and product teams, and engaging senior technical leaders.

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 into flight-ready autonomy pipelines optimized for SWaP-constrained airframes.
• Lead partner engineering teams through onboarding and integration, delivering 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, providing insights to NVIDIA engineering and product teams to guide roadmaps for Jetson Thor, Isaac, and Holoscan.
• Engage senior technical leaders, tackle sophisticated architectural challenges, and 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

• 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, including onboard inference, multi-sensor time synchronization, and mission autonomy when communications are degraded or denied.
• 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

• 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.
• Active clearance (Secret or above) or eligibility to acquire one.

Skills

• Deep technical credibility in robotics, onboard autonomy, or flight software.
• Proven record of influencing partner roadmaps and delivering production autonomy stacks on DoD timelines.

Benefits

• Competitive salaries and a generous benefits package.
• Opportunities to work with developers and craft the future of AI in the public sector.

Pay

Base salary range: $272,000 - $431,250 USD.

Schedule

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.