Principal Software Engineer, Onboard Infrastructure

About the role

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will help define and build the high-performance, highly reliable foundation of the Nuro Driver. This role spans Device Platform, Performance, and Onboard Systems, requiring deep technical leadership across sensor and compute integration, onboard runtime systems, distributed execution, and autonomy software performance.

Responsibilities

• Architect hardware-agnostic device interfaces, inter-device communication pipelines, runtime APIs, and onboard software platforms that enable Nuro’s autonomy stack to run safely and efficiently across current and future vehicle platforms.
• Lead system-wide performance and reliability efforts, including latency reduction, resource efficiency, observability, automated validation, and tooling for debugging complex onboard systems.
• Partner with autonomy, hardware, safety, validation, operations, and supplier-facing teams to integrate next-generation sensors and compute platforms, resolve reliability and performance issues, and shape the long-term technical direction of Nuro’s onboard infrastructure.
• Translate ambiguous product, safety, and autonomy needs into scalable technical architecture; align teams on design direction, execution plans, interfaces, and long-term platform strategy.
• Mentor engineers, establish engineering best practices, and raise the technical bar across Onboard Infrastructure and partner teams.

Requirements

• Master’s degree or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Robotics, or related field.
• 8+ years of software engineering experience building production-quality systems software.
• 5+ years of technical leadership experience, including leading complex projects, setting technical direction, and driving cross-team alignment.
• Strong proficiency in modern C++, with deep experience in concurrency, multi-threading, debugging, memory management, and performance optimization.
• Experience building reliable, high-performance software for robotics, embedded systems, autonomous systems, distributed systems, or other performance-critical platforms.
• Strong systems-level expertise, with the ability to reason across operating systems, device interfaces, runtime frameworks, and application-level workloads.
• Proven ability to diagnose complex performance, reliability, concurrency, and hardware/software integration issues.
• Ability to translate ambiguous requirements into scalable architecture and mentor engineers through design and execution.

Qualifications

• Bonus points for:
• Master’s degree or PhD in CS, EE, Computer Engineering, Robotics, or a related field.
• Experience with robotics hardware, sensors, embedded compute platforms, or autonomous vehicle systems.
• Deep knowledge of Linux, device drivers, computer architecture, kernel behavior, and communication protocols such as Ethernet, PCIe, USB, SPI, I2C, or UART.
• Experience with high-performance communication, IPC, networking stacks, logging, monitoring, diagnostics, or data collection systems.
• Experience with GPU programming, NVIDIA platforms, CUDA, image processing, machine learning infrastructure, or accelerated compute.
• Experience working with hardware suppliers or integrating next-generation sensor and compute platforms.