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, driving technology from research and prototypes through production and scale. 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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Requirements

• 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.

Qualifications

• 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 – $488,750 USD (determined by location, experience, and internal equity). Equity and benefits are also included.