Developer Relations Manager, Higher Education and Research - Foundational AI
NVIDIA is hiring a Developer Relations Manager, Higher Education and Research - Foundational AI in Toronto, Canada. It pays CAD 170k-CAD 220k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on NVIDIA.
Level's read on this job
- Builds AI ●●●● is how Level rates this role: the job is building AI systems.
- The posting mentions PyTorch, JAX and fine tuning among its tools and skills.
- Level classes it as a senior role.
- NVIDIA has 2,700+ other open roles on Level.
AI in this role
We are seeking a mission-driven Developer Relations Manager focused on Foundational AI Research to engage leading academic labs advancing the next generation of AI models, systems, and methods. In this role, you will work directly with top researchers building frontier AI systems, including large language models, multimodal models, reasoning systems, training methods, inference systems, model serving, and scalable AI infrastructure. You will help researchers adopt NVIDIA’s AI and accelerated computing platforms to push the boundaries of model performance, efficiency, and scale.
The ideal candidate brings deep technical credibility in foundational AI, strong research engagement experience, and ecosystem knowledge.
What you'll be doing:
Serve as a trusted technical advisor to leading academic AI labs working on foundation models, LLMs, multimodal AI, reasoning, training, inference, and AI systems.
Identify high-impact research workloads where NVIDIA software, systems, and accelerated computing platforms can advance model performance, scale, and efficiency.
Engage principal investigators, postdocs, graduate researchers, and lab leadership to understand research goals, technical blockers, infrastructure needs, and collaboration opportunities.
Track frontier AI research across papers, benchmarks, open-source projects, and academic labs to identify emerging trends and future platform opportunities.
Partner with Research Account Managers, Solution Architects, Product, Engineering, and Business Development teams to support researcher adoption and long-term engagement.
Represent researcher needs internally by translating academic feedback into actionable insights for product roadmaps, developer programs, education, and platform strategy.
Support NVIDIA participation in major AI, ML, and systems research venues through technical content, workshops, university engagements, and lab-facing programs.
What we need to see:
PhD in Computer Science, AI, Machine Learning, Applied Mathematics, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent research depth.
8+ years of experience
Deep expertise in foundational AI, including LLMs, multimodal models, generative AI, reasoning, post-training, model evaluation, or AI systems research.
Strong understanding of modern AI model development across the lifecycle, including pretraining, fine-tuning, post-training, optimization, evaluation, deployment, and model serving.
Hands-on experience with AI research stacks such as PyTorch, JAX, distributed training frameworks, inference systems, model serving platforms, evaluation pipelines, and GPU-accelerated workflows.
Technical fluency in scalable AI systems, including distributed training, parallelism strategies, checkpointing, memory optimization, batching, scheduling, latency, throughput, and cost-performance tradeoffs.
Familiarity with methods that improve model efficiency and performance, such as quantization, distillation, sparsity, speculative decoding, attention optimization, synthetic data generation, RLHF/RLAIF, and preference optimization.
Ability to engage top academic labs on frontier research challenges, including scaling behavior, compute efficiency, model quality, benchmark methodology, reproducibility, reliability, and research impact.
Demonstrated research credibility through publications, open-source contributions, academic collaborations, technical leadership, or direct work on frontier AI systems.
Ways to stand out from the crowd:
Experience with NVIDIA AI platforms, including CUDA, CUDA-X libraries, TensorRT-LLM, Triton Inference Server, NIM, NeMo, Megatron, Transformer Engine, NCCL, DGX, NVLink, InfiniBand, or NVIDIA AI Enterprise.
Established relationships with leading AI labs, academic institutions, research institutes, benchmark communities, or major open-source AI projects.
Track record translating frontier AI research into demos, tutorials, reference architectures, workshops, technical blogs, or developer enablement programs.
Experience presenting at venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, AAAI , or related research workshops.
Ability to identify emerging research trends and convert them into strategic opportunities for collaboration, platform adoption, and ecosystem growth.
NVIDIA is widely considered to be one of the technology world’s most desirable employers! We have some of the most forward-thinking and hardworking people in the world working for us. If you're creative and autonomous, we want to hear from you. NVIDIA is committed to foster a diverse work environment and proud to be an equal opportunity employer!
Your base salary will be determined based on your location, experience, and other objective job-related factors. The expected base salary ranges for this position are:170,000 CAD – 220,000 CAD for Level 4; and 225,000 CAD – 275,000 CAD for Level 5.
You will also be eligible for equity and benefits.
Applications for this job will be accepted at least until November 3, 2026.This posting is for an existing vacancy.
NVIDIA uses AI tools in its recruiting processes.
How we rate this
Developer Relations Manager, Higher Education and Research - Foundational AI at NVIDIA rates 96 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Questions you could be asked
- Walk me through fine-tuning a model: what data did you use, and how did you check the result?
- How do you decide that one model's output is better than another's for a given task?
- Tell me about a research question you investigated. What did you find?
- What's a project where you used PyTorch hands-on?
- Walk me through how you've used JAX in your day-to-day work.
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: Fine-tuning, AI Evaluation, AI Research, PyTorch, and JAX. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
- Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.
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