Principal Software Engineer - Compute Infrastructure

What You Will Be Doing

• Define Platform Architecture: Lead initiatives to architect and transform our global enterprise compute platform—running thousands of nodes and tens of thousands of VMs and containers via OpenShift and KubeVirt—by defining service tiers, SLAs, and automated cluster lifecycles.
• Operationalize Frontier AI Infrastructure: Build the operational foundation for our internal AI inference platform scaling to frontier-class models. You will develop automated remediation pipelines, hardware watchdogs, and telemetry for pre-release, rack-scale GPU systems (including Blackwell and upcoming architectures).
• Drive Strategic Capacity & Scale: Collect and review system data for capacity planning to navigate extreme hardware supply constraints. Develop proactive strategies, including public cloud bursting, hardware dogfooding, and evaluating alternative compute architectures (e.g., ARM).
• Build the "Paved Road": Collaborate with highly autonomous NVIDIA engineering teams to drive cultural adoption of standard platforms. You will design compelling self-service architectures, APIs, and Terraform/OpenTofu providers that teams want to use.
• Lead Complex Migrations: Evaluate existing application architectures and drive the fraught but critical migration of massive legacy workloads—including large-scale, long-running VDI environments—into modern Kubernetes orchestration.

What We Need To See

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, or related field, or equivalent experience.
• 15+ years of proven experience in compute platform engineering, site reliability, or systems architecture with a heavy focus on automation at massive scale.
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes architecture and designing/deploying virtualization architectures, specifically operating VMs inside K8s (KubeVirt, OpenShift).
• In-depth knowledge of hardware technologies (GPUs, high-speed backplane networking) with a track record of mitigating hardware-level failures, silent data corruption, and anomalies in large-scale environments.
• Experience running large global environments spanning bare metal, virtualized infrastructure, and cloud with a unified GitOps posture (ArgoCD or similar).
• Proficiency in programming languages such as Go and/or Python, alongside expert-level infrastructure-as-code development (Terraform, Config Management).
• Strong leadership skills with the ability to influence technical direction across highly autonomous teams without relying on top-down mandates.

Ways To Stand Out From The Crowd

• Hands-on experience managing bleeding-edge, pre-release hardware in production environments.
• Solid understanding of advanced storage migrations and protocols (NFSv4, NVMe/TCP, Hyperconverged storage).
• Proven track record of building "Day 2" operational maturity (self-service, advanced auto-remediation, strict SLAs) from the ground up on existing foundations.

Base Salary Range: 248,000 USD - 391,000 USD.

NVIDIA is widely considered to be one of the technology world’s most desirable employers. We have some of the most forward-thinking and dedicated people in the world working for us. If you are creative and autonomous, we want to hear from you!

Your base salary will be determined based on your location, experience, and the pay of employees in similar positions.

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.