Senior Software Architect, AI Networking (Santa Clara)

An applied research team within NVIDIA’s Networking Systems & Software Architecture group is solving some of AI’s hardest infrastructure problems. The team builds systems-level software that moves data between GPUs, nodes, and storage at the speed modern AI demands—spanning low-level transport optimization, hardware-software co-design, and communication frameworks that plug directly into production AI stacks. The team's charter expands into emerging domains including quantum computing interconnects.

What you will be doing:

• Architecting and implementing high-performance communication and memory management libraries for distributed AI
• Driving hardware-software co-optimization with GPU, DPU, NIC, and switch teams through GPUDirect RDMA, NVLink, and next-generation interconnects
• Profiling and optimizing data movement across GPU memory, system DRAM, NVMe, and network fabrics
• Integrating networking capabilities into AI serving stacks such as vLLM, SGLang, and TensorRT-LLM
• Contributing to and maintaining open-source projects, mentoring engineers, conducting design reviews, and prototyping experimental technologies to evaluate their viability

What we need to see:

• 12+ years in systems software and/or networking with demonstrated ownership of complex projects.
• MS, PhD or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
• Solid understanding of high-performance networking: InfiniBand, RoCE, RDMA, NVLink, GPUDirect.
• Strong C/C++/Rust systems programming with comfort in performance profiling and low-level debugging.
• Understanding of ML systems concepts—transformer architectures, KV cache mechanics, model parallelism, or distributed training and inference patterns.

Ways to stand out from the crowd:

• Knowledge of ML inference frameworks (vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM) and their communication requirements.
• Knowledge of storage networking (NVMe-oF, GPUDirect Storage, S3).
• Background of Reinforcement Learning systems.

Your base salary will be determined based on location, experience, and the pay of employees in similar positions. The base salary range is USD 224,000 - 356,500 for Level 5, and USD 272,000 - 431,250 for Level 6.

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. As we highly value diversity in our current and future employees, we do not discriminate (including in our hiring and promotion practices) on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status or any other characteristic protected by law.