Principal Systems Software Engineer, LPU

We are now looking for a Principal Software Engineer for LPX System Software!NVIDIA’s LPX System Software team builds the foundational software that turns a noveldeterministic compute architecture into a platform that compiler teams and data centeroperators can rely on. We shift complexity out of silicon and into software: the hardwareabstraction layers, core system libraries, drivers, and runtime components that workloads enter the platform through.We build this stack in Rust. For system software living at the boundary between hardware andeverything above it, we treat memory safety, explicit ownership, and long-lived API stability asthe baseline rather than the goal — the foundation that lets us spend our judgment on the hard problems instead of on classes of bugs that should not exist.

As one of the principal engineers on this stack, set technical direction for the surfaces youown and shape the overall architecture alongside your fellow principals. Design theHAL, runtime interfaces, and data-movement pipelines the rest of the platform depends on;drive the hardest reliability and bring-up problems to root cause; and raise the throughput of thewhole org by codifying the abstractions, patterns, and tooling that others build on. You will alsohelp define how we engineer. We treat AI coding agents as a primary part of the workflow, andwe expect our most senior engineers to be fluent in directing them — designing systems thatare legible to both humans and agents, and turning hard-won judgment into leverage across theteam.

What you’ll be doing:

•  Shape the architecture of the hardware abstraction layers and core system libraries, and own the API contracts for the components you lead.

• Design and implement drivers, runtimes, and data movement and aggregation pipelines that execute workloads on novel silicon.

• Build runtime interfaces for launching, monitoring, and managing workloads at production scale.

• Drive triage of the most difficult sequencing, initialization, and cross-component runtime failures, and produce root-cause analyses that change how the system is built.

• Lead new platform bring-up and NPI for new boards and silicon, in tight partnership with hardware engineering, compiler teams, and data center operations.

• Multiply the team — establish the agent-assisted engineering practices, reusable abstractions, diagnostics, and documentation that let everyone move faster without destabilizing the platform.

• Communicate architecture and design tradeoffs clearly, in writing and in diagrams, to audiences ranging from individual engineers to executive staff. 

What we need to see:

• MS in CS, CE, EE, or a related STEM field, or equivalent experience, and 12+ yearsbuilding production system software.

• Deep systems-programming expertise, with Rust as your language of choice for low-levelwork. You have shipped production Rust at the hardware or kernel boundary — drivers,firmware, runtimes, or similar — and you can articulate from experience where Rust earnsits keep in system software and where it costs you. We work in Rust from day one; comfortis not enough, we want conviction.

• A track record of designing and evolving libraries and APIs meant to be supported foryears, including ABI and compatibility discipline.

• Fluency in large, multi-repository codebases with layered dependencies.

• Demonstrated leadership driving triage of difficult reliability issues to clear, written root-cause analysis.

• Low-level platform experience: firmware and boot flows, RTOS, BMCs/MCUs, RISC-V, orclosely related system software.

• Linux driver or kernel-adjacent experience (for example, VFIO or similar subsystems).

• Hardware bring-up and system triage experience: fault analysis, diagnostics, andvalidation in lab environments.

• An established habit: building with AI coding agents — not as a novelty, but as a way youalready ship and raise leverage. You can speak to how you design work to be agent-amenable and where you keep humans in the loop.
   

Ways to stand out from the crowd:

• Experience having built Rust system software at the scale of a hyperscaler or a Rust-nativehardware company — the kind of environment where Rust is the production language forlow-level work, not an experiment.

• Distributed systems experience: gRPC and RPC frameworks, coordination and telemetrypatterns, MPI.Inference systems and token serving experience (vLLM or similar serving and runtimestacks) a huge plus.

• Experience shipping and supporting customer-facing SDKs, including documentation andABI compatibility practices.

• Production readiness and delivery depth: CI/CD and release workflows, monitoring andalerting practices, Kubernetes, and data center operational workflows.

Widely considered to be one of the technology world’s most desirable employers, NVIDIA has some of the most forward-thinking and hardworking people in the world inventing the future with us. Are you a creative and collaborative software lead seeking new challenges? If so, we want to hear from you! Join us and help build the real-time, cost-effective AI inference and computing platform that's driving our success in this exciting and quickly growing field.