Senior Software Engineer - Applied Research in Robotics

As the world’s leading accelerated computing company, NVIDIA is paving the way in robotics, self-driving cars, machine learning, supercomputing, and visualization. We are building a team that will help define the next generation of robotics acceleration across NVIDIA platforms, and we would love for you to join us. We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer - Applied Research in Robotics to research, prototype, and optimize robotics solutions that use NVIDIA’s Programmable Vision Accelerator (PVA), a power-efficient, deterministic VLIW/SIMD processor used across NVIDIA DRIVE, Jetson, and IGX platforms. In this role, you will identify high-impact robotics workloads and map them to efficient execution on the NVIDIA’s Programmable Vision Accelerator, or PVA. You will work at the intersection of robotics systems, sensor and actuator processing, heterogeneous computing, and algorithm optimization. Your work will help improve latency, determinism, power efficiency, and throughput for real-time robotics systems. What You’ll Be Doing: • Research and analyze end-to-end robotics software stacks to discover, characterize, and prioritize high-impact workloads that can be accelerated on PVA. • Design, implement, test, and optimize PVA operators for robotics workloads, including end-to-end integration into real robotics pipelines. • Research parallelization and data movement strategies for mapping robotics algorithms onto PVA efficiently! • Work across camera, RADAR, LiDAR, IMU, perception, planning, and actuator paths to understand algorithmic requirements, memory behavior, timing constraints, and real-time execution needs. • Build benchmarks, validation infrastructure, and technical mentorship for robotics teams adopting PVA acceleration! • Collaborate with robotics, hardware architecture, compiler, system software, sensor, and platform teams to define acceleration strategies and interfaces. • Support internal and external teams developing and optimizing robotics algorithms on PVA. • Leverage modern AI-assisted development tools and agentic workflows to accelerate workload analysis, algorithm creation, benchmarking, and performance exploration. • Write high-quality, maintainable C/C++ code, performance tests, user documentation, and validation infrastructure for robotics acceleration workflows. What We Need To See: • BS/MS or PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or equivalent experience. • 5+ years of experience in robotics software, embedded systems, accelerated computing, computer vision, sensor processing, perception systems, or related areas. • Strong robotics algorithm knowledge, with practical understanding of perception, sensor fusion, control, planning, or actuator pipelines. • Strong C/C++ programming skills, including low-level debugging, performance profiling, optimization, and production-quality software development. • Experience analyzing algorithms and mapping workloads to heterogeneous hardware such as CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, SIMD/VLIW processors, or domain-specific accelerators. • Deep understanding of embedded systems, SoC architecture, memory hierarchy, cache behavior, DMA, real-time scheduling, and performance bottlenecks. • Experience with embedded Linux and/or QNX development environments. • Experience with robotics middleware, ROS 2, real robot bring-up, sensor integration, or actuator/control paths. • Strong communication, collaboration, analytical, and problem-solving skills in a fast-paced multi-functional environment. Ways To Stand Out from the crowd: • Background with NVIDIA Jetson, DRIVE, IGX, ISSAC, VPI, NvMedia, or PVA. • Experience building robotics applications that use CUDA or other accelerators for perception, planning, simulation, or real-time sensor processing. • Familiarity with safety-conscious development processes such as ISO 26262, IEC 61508, or similar standards. NVIDIA is widely considered to be one of the technology world’s most desirable employers. We have some of the most forward-thinking people in the world working for us. If you're creative and autonomous, we want to hear from you. NVIDIA is leading the way in groundbreaking developments in Artificial Intelligence, High-Performance Computing and Visualization. The GPU, our invention, serves as the visual cortex of modern computers and is at the heart of our products and services. Our work opens up new universes to explore, enables amazing creativity and discovery, and powers what were once science fiction inventions from artificial intelligence to autonomous cars. NVIDIA is looking for extraordinary people like you to help us accelerate the next wave of artificial intelligence.