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Principal Perception Engineer, Obstacle Foundation Models - Autonomous Vehicles

NVIDIA· Engineer, Sys SW
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Santa Clara, CA, Remote, Hybrid (Remote - US)$272k - $431.3kFull-timePosted 3mo ago

About the role

Senior individual contributor leading the design and productization of NVIDIA’s next-generation autonomous driving perception stack, focusing on 3D obstacle perception with transformer-based, multi-modal techniques and production-grade deployment.

Responsibilities

  • Own the technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for 3D obstacle perception to support end-to-end autonomous driving functionalities, leveraging state-of-the-art CNN and transformer-based architectures where appropriate.
  • Design and develop advanced 3D perception models using multi-camera inputs and/or multi-sensor fusion (camera, radar, lidar) for obstacle detection and tracking, including BEV and transformer-based 3D perception.
  • Lead the development of efficient, production-grade deep learning models: define objectives, select architectures, guide experimentation, and establish best practices for training and evaluation, using techniques such as large-scale pretraining, distillation, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (e.g., LoRA).
  • Define and drive KPI frameworks to quantify perception performance; analyze large-scale real and synthetic datasets to identify failure modes and systematically improve accuracy, robustness, and efficiency, incorporating self-supervised and representation learning when beneficial.
  • Lead data strategy for perception: specify data and labeling requirements, prioritize data collection and annotation, and collaborate with data and ground-truth teams to maximize impact, including model-assisted workflows (active learning, auto-labeling, VLMs) and model-in-the-loop tooling.
  • Partner with safety, systems, and software teams to ensure perception solutions meet product requirements for safety, latency, resource usage, and software robustness, and are ready for deployment at scale.
  • Provide technical leadership and mentorship to other engineers, influencing design and implementation across the broader perception and autonomy teams.

Qualifications

  • 15+ years of hands-on experience developing deep learning–based perception or closely related systems for complex real-world problems, with strong proficiency in PyTorch and a track record of taking models from prototype to production.
  • Demonstrated technical leadership as a senior or principal-level individual contributor: owning features or subsystems end-to-end, setting technical direction, making architectural decisions, and coordinating across teams.
  • Proven experience in data-driven development, including close collaboration with data, labeling, and ground-truth teams on data strategy, labeling quality, and iterative model improvement.
  • Strong programming skills in Python and/or C++, with a history of building reliable, high-performance, production-quality software.
  • Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence, align, and drive consensus across multidisciplinary teams.
  • BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or related fields (or equivalent experience).

Skills

Required:Deep learning for perceptionPyTorchC++Data strategy and labeling
Nice to have:Transformer-based perception

Benefits

  • Equity
  • Benefits (as listed in company benefits page)
Last updated Oct 9, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About NVIDIA

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NVIDIA invents the GPU and drives advances in AI, HPC, gaming, creative design, autonomous vehicles, and robotics.

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