Distinguished Engineer, AI Safety and Security Engineering

NVIDIA is hiring a Distinguished Engineer, AI Safety and Security Engineering in Santa Clara, United States. It pays $320k-$489k 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 AI safety among its tools and skills.
Level classes it as a senior role.
NVIDIA has 2,600+ other open roles on Level.

AI in this role

ai-safety

NVIDIA is seeking a Distinguished Engineer to serve as the founding technical leader for our AI Safety & Security Engineering team. Rooted in the firm belief that open-weight models, transparency, and broad scientific scrutiny are foundational to American AI leadership and cybersecurity defense, our newly assembled team builds AI-powered tooling to discover, validate, and patch software vulnerabilities. In this foundational role, you will take full ownership of the core harness architecture and baseline engineering standards, guiding our program from early-stage prototypes into a dependable, reviewable production pipeline. Your technical roadmap will dictate how NVIDIA designs, tests, and validates its safety-critical AI systems for years to come. Recognizing that technical leadership is fundamentally collaborative, you will work side-by-side with engineering managers, security partners, and evaluation teams to build consensus through active listening and transparent reasoning.

You will act as the crucial bridge between exploratory research ideas and rigorous software engineering, finding balanced paths forward where innovation meets enterprise reliability. Beyond system design, teaching and mentorship are primary components of this position rather than optional add-ons. You will actively review designs across the organization, keeping code quality and safety standards highly visible without hindering engineering velocity. Ultimately, the architectural frameworks and team culture you establish early on will outlive any single component, directly shaping both the careers of founding engineers and the future of secure AI systems.

What You'll Be Doing:

Architecture: Define the canonical harness architecture and component baseline.
Engineering standards: Set the engineering standards the team builds on.
Technical roadmap: Guide the Find, Validate, and Patch technical roadmap.
Mentorship: Mentor founding engineers and support their growth.

What We Need To See:

Bachelor's degree (or equivalent experience) with 18+ years designing and building complex systems.
Architecture depth: Deep experience architecting distributed systems, ML pipelines, or large-scale platforms.
Research to production: A record of turning research into production-grade engineering.
Collaboration: Ability to align engineers and researchers on one technical direction.

Ways to Stand Out from the Crowd:

Security exposure: Vulnerability research or security engineering experience.
Agent systems: Familiarity with agent frameworks or LLM-based tooling.
Evaluation: Experience building evaluation or benchmarking infrastructure.

With competitive salaries and a generous benefits package, NVIDIA is widely considered to be one of the technology industry's most desirable employers. We have some of the most forward-thinking and versatile people in the world working with us, and our engineering teams are growing fast in some of the most impactful fields of our generation: Confidential Computing and Data. If you're a creative engineer who enjoys autonomy and shares our passion for technology, we want to hear from you.

Your base salary will be determined based on your location, experience, and other objective job-related factors. The expected base salary range for this position is 320,000 USD – 488,750 USD.

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.

NVIDIA is committed to fostering an inclusive 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.

How we rate this

Distinguished Engineer, AI Safety and Security Engineering at NVIDIA rates 83 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.

Classification

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.

Key facts

Distinguished Engineer, AI Safety and Security Engineering is an open job at NVIDIA.
Level rates this role AI Level 4 of 4: Builds AI.
The listed salary is $320k-$489k a year.
The role is based in US, CA, Santa Clara.
The job was posted on September 11, 2026.
Seniority: senior.
Applications are handled by NVIDIA. Apply on NVIDIA

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

AI Safety

Questions you could be asked

How do you think about the risk of an AI system in this kind of role failing silently?
How would you decide a model or AI system is ready to ship?
Tell me about a time a model underperformed in production. How did you find out, and what did you change?

Adapt your resume

List these exact terms on your resume: AI Safety. 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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