Distinguished Engineer, Scaled Out Inferencing
NVIDIA is hiring a Distinguished Engineer, Scaled Out Inferencing 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
- On Level's scale, this role is Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
- Tools and skills the posting cites include vLLM.
- Level classifies it as a senior role.
- Level lists 2,700+ other open roles at NVIDIA.
AI in this role
NVIDIA is leading the industry in delivering accelerated computing in cloud and enterprise environments. We’re a team of innovative engineers dedicated to solving some of the world’s biggest challenges, constantly driving advancements, and impacting millions of lives worldwide!
As a technology leader at NVIDIA, you will lead the development of our global strategy for scaled-out AI inferencing. You will architect the high-throughput, low-latency distributed pipelines and model serving strategies required for massive scale and production reliability. You will define and drive the technical roadmap for full-lifecycle, from deployment and versioning to automated scaling, across enterprise and cloud environments. Working with NVIDIA leadership, you will establish the systems and orchestration layers that enable the world’s most advanced AI models to run with peak efficiency on our accelerated computing hardware.
What You’ll Be Doing:
Various Architectural Work: Architect distributed pipelines, define and drive the technical implementation of high-throughput, low-latency, distributed inference systems to support massive-scale AI workloads.
Collaborate on Cross Domain Disciplines: Hardware-software co-optimization, drive performance tuning at the kernel and driver level, optimizing GPU resource management and hardware acceleration for production-grade model serving.
Collaborate on Open Source and Ecosystem Projects: Guide and influence open source projects Dynamo, TensorRT-LLM, and ecosystem projects (vLLM, SGLang, Linux, Kubernetes, Ray) to bring state of the art inferencing on NVIDIA accelerated hardware.
Accelerate Integration: Orchestrate model lifecycles, lead the strategy for full-lifecycle model management, including automated deployment, versioning, and intelligent scaling across varied cloud and datacenter environments.
Engage Stakeholders: Collaborate with customers, infrastructure providers, and partners to ensure NVIDIA’s solutions set the industry standard for performance and availability.
Full Software and System Lifecycle: From ideation to architecture, design, development, deployment, operations, and full lifecycle management, lead all technical aspects of planning and continuous evolution of a large technical scope.
What We Need to See:
16+ overall years in technical roles with a recent long-term focus on AI infrastructure and more recent direct experience in large-scale inference orchestration. Proven track record building secure, highly available, and durable production distributed systems.
7-10+ years of leadership experience
BS/MS or higher or equivalent experience in systems / software engineering, or related engineering fields
Deep Technical Expertise: Proficiency in GPU architecture, hardware acceleration, and low-level performance tuning (CUDA, kernels) alongside cloud-native architectures for multi-tenant model serving.
Proven success delivering high-impact technically complex solutions that achieve high levels of transparency into resource utilization, performance, and operational insights.
Technical Leadership: Develop and advance consensus and organizational alignment across technical leadership and the highest level of senior corporate leadership. Ability to synthesize cross-functional needs into architecture and design while guiding internal execution across diverse teams.
Communication and Teamwork: Strong collaboration and influence skills, capable of leading engineering engagement, communicating with peers, partners, and working with high performance and accelerated computing customers.
Ways to Stand Out from the Crowd:
Application of Artificial Intelligence: Real world experience building the systems to support AI/ML workloads.
Industry Expertise: Direct experience in designing, developing, delivering and operating secure, highly available, scaled out systems in enterprise and cloud environments.
Engineering Enablement: Demonstrated history of creating scalable processes and extensible systems that facilitate cross-functional collaboration and operations at scale.
Open Source Collaboration: Familiarity with open source ecosystems and projects (e.g. Dynamo, TensorRT-LLM, vLLM, SGLang, Ray). Ability to collaborate and influence in open source project governance to represent NVIDIA, customers, and partners interests in technical alignment and direction.
NVIDIA is leading the way in groundbreaking developments in Artificial Intelligence, High-Performance Computing and Visualization. The GPU, our invention, serves as the visual cortex of modern computers and is at the heart of our products and services. We have some of the most forward-thinking and hardworking people on the planet working for us. If you're creative, passionate and self-motivated, we want to hear from you!
With competitive salaries and a generous benefits package (www.nvidiabenefits.com), we are 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 and, due to outstanding growth, our best-in-class engineering teams are rapidly growing. If you're a creative and autonomous engineer with a real passion for technology, we want to hear from you!
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, Scaled Out Inferencing at NVIDIA rates 93 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
- What's a project where you used vLLM hands-on?
- 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: vLLM. 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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