Director, Engineering - Autonomous Vehicles

About the role

NVIDIA is building an advanced AI-native autonomous driving architecture that integrates traditional safety-focused autonomous systems, fully learned driving approaches, foundation models, world models, and scalable AI systems into one production platform. We seek a Director-level technical leader who can define this architecture and build a world-class engineering organization. This leader will work across classical autonomy and modern AI, bringing together teams and technologies in prediction, planning, control, safety, end-to-end driving, large-scale pre-trained models, and embodied AI.

What You'll Be Doing

• Set the technical vision and architecture for NVIDIA's next-generation autonomous driving stack, spanning both classical and learning-based approaches
• Build and lead a high-performing organization of engineers and technical leaders working across Prediction, Decision Making, Planning, Control, and Safety
• Define how classical safety-critical autonomy and learned driving systems work together within a unified production architecture
• Drive the architecture for robust system-level safety, redundancy, fallback, and degraded-mode strategies
• Lead the development and productionization of end-to-end, data-driven autonomous driving pipelines, from perception and reasoning through trajectory building and vehicle operation
• Advance large-scale vision-language-action (VLA) / driving foundation models and their integration into production autonomous vehicles
• Partner closely with research teams to translate breakthroughs in robotics, embodied AI, foundation models, and generative AI into production self-driving technology

What We Need To See

• PhD with 12+ years, MS with 10+ years, or BS (or equivalent experience) with 15+ overall years of relevant industry experience in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Robotics, Machine Learning, or a related technical field
• 8+ years of experience leading a team
• Significant technical leadership experience, including leading senior engineers, architects, and/or engineering managers working on sophisticated production systems
• Extensive knowledge of traditional driverless vehicle system designs, including prediction, planning, decision making, control, safety, redundancy, and fallback systems
• Solid grasp of modern learning-based autonomy, including end-to-end driving models, foundation models, large-scale machine learning systems, or embodied AI
• Experience driving end-to-end self-driving system builds and understanding interactions involving perception as well as planning and control
• Demonstrated ability to attract, recruit, mentor, and grow exceptional engineering talent
• Excellent interpersonal skills with a capacity to influence technical experts, executives, researchers, and cross-functional partners

Ways To Stand Out From The Crowd

• Experience building hybrid AV architectures combining classical safety systems with end-to-end learned driving
• Experience with VLA frameworks, global representations, foundational architectures, large-scale multimodal systems, or generative approaches to autonomous driving
• Experience with CUDA, GPU computing, and accelerated AI infrastructure
• A record of technical leadership through patents, publications, widely deployed systems, or significant contributions to driverless vehicle technology, robotics, or embodied AI

Pay

Base salary range: 320,000 USD - 488,750 USD, plus equity and benefits.