Senior Software Engineer - Autonomous Vehicles

About the role

NVIDIA is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to help define the runtime intelligence and safety architecture behind next-generation autonomous driving systems. This role sits at the intersection of end-to-end AI driving models, vehicle dynamics, and safety-critical autonomy. You will build the framework that bridges large-scale learned driving models with deterministic planning and vehicle-level safety guardrails—ensuring AI-generated trajectories are physically feasible, safe, explainable, and deployable on real automotive hardware platforms.

This role is ideal for engineers excited about bringing modern AI into real-world physical systems where latency, compute efficiency, vehicle dynamics, and safety constraints fundamentally matter.

Responsibilities

• Design and integrate planning frameworks that combine end-to-end learned driving models with classical trajectory planning and deterministic safety systems.
• Develop runtime arbitration and safety enforcement mechanisms between AI-generated trajectories and rule-based safety constraints.
• Build scalable architecture enabling large AI driving models to operate reliably within automotive compute, latency, and real-time execution constraints.
• Develop execution frameworks that ensure AI-generated behaviors satisfy vehicle dynamics, collision avoidance, passenger comfort, and safety requirements in real time.
• Define and implement safety-oriented planning capabilities including trajectory validation, fallback handling, runtime policy gating, and Minimum Risk Maneuver (MRM) strategies.
• Partner closely with AI, planning, controls, and systems teams to productize learned driving models into deployable autonomous vehicle systems.
• Analyze and debug complex autonomy edge cases involving uncertainty, model failure modes, planner disagreement, and real-world safety constraints.
• Improve observability, reliability, and debuggability across large-scale autonomy planning systems operating in simulation and on-vehicle environments.
• Drive architectural decisions balancing AI capability, system robustness, safety, and embedded deployment efficiency.
• Influence next-generation autonomy architecture defining how foundation-model and learning-based driving systems coexist with production-grade safety-critical vehicle platforms.

Requirements

• BS, MS, or PhD (or equivalent experience) in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, AI/ML, or related technical field.
• 12+ years of relevant industry experience in autonomous systems, robotics, AI infrastructure, or safety-critical software systems.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals with production C++ development experience.
• Strong understanding of autonomous vehicle planning, trajectory generation, motion planning, or robotics systems.
• Experience working with machine learning systems and understanding how learned models behave under uncertainty and real-world edge cases.
• Experience delivering scalable, production-quality systems from architecture through deployment.
• Strong debugging, systems integration, and performance optimization skills for real-time systems.
• Excellent communication and cross-functional technical leadership abilities.

Skills

• Experience deploying machine learning models into real-time embedded or robotics systems.
• Deep understanding of both classical planning systems and end-to-end learning approaches for autonomous driving.
• Experience with runtime safety validation, fallback systems, policy gating, or safety arbitration frameworks.
• Familiarity with foundation-model-based driving systems, learned planners, generative trajectory models, or AI-native autonomy stacks.
• Strong intuition for bridging the gap between offline AI model capability and production deployment constraints.
• Experience with large-scale autonomy simulation, scenario replay, evaluation infrastructure, or safety validation pipelines.
• Passion for solving deeply challenging engineering problems at the intersection of AI, robotics, and real-world deployment.

Pay

Your base salary will be determined based on your location, experience, and the pay of employees in similar positions. The base salary range is 224,000 USD - 356,500 USD. You will also be eligible for equity and benefits.

NVIDIA is committed to fostering a diverse work environment and proud to be an equal opportunity employer.