Manager, Software Engineering
NVIDIA is hiring a Manager, Software Engineering in Santa Clara, United States. It pays $224k-$357k 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.
- The posting mentions AI research among its tools and skills.
- Level classes it as a senior role.
- NVIDIA has 2,700+ other open roles on Level.
- Posted in the last few days.
AI in this role
NVIDIA is a pioneer in accelerated computing, known for inventing the GPU and driving breakthroughs in gaming, computer graphics, high-performance computing, and artificial intelligence. Our technology powers everything from generative AI to autonomous systems, and we continue to shape the future of computing through innovation and collaboration. Within this mission, our team, Managed AI Research Superclusters (MARS), builds and scales the infrastructure, platforms, and tools that enable researchers and engineers to develop the next generation of AI/ML systems. By joining us, you'll help build solutions that power some of the most sophisticated computing workloads globally.
We build and run the platform that NVIDIA's own researchers use to train frontier models. That means some of the largest GPU clusters in the world, spread across multiple clouds and partners, used for pre-training, post-training and reinforcement learning. Our engineers own how work gets scheduled onto that fleet, how data and checkpoints move through it, and the Kubernetes-based platform underneath. We are looking for an engineering manager to lead one of these engineering teams. You will grow a team of strong engineers, own a platform area end to end, and work directly with research teams whose results depend on it. You will shape what the platform becomes, not only keep it running.
What you'll be doing:
- Lead, hire and grow a team of software and systems engineers, including senior and staff-level engineers and tech leads.
- Lead a core part of the AI infrastructure platform end to end: its roadmap, architecture, reliability and on-call health.
- Turn research needs into platform capabilities by working directly with model training teams.
- Set clear ownership and decision rights for your area: named owners, written decisions, and clean interfaces to partner teams.
- Drive engineering quality at fleet scale: automation over manual operations, observability built in, safe rollouts across many clusters.
- Partner with infrastructure, storage, networking, Kubernetes and cloud-provider teams across NVIDIA, and with external vendors and open-source communities.
- Measure what matters for researchers, such as reliability, latency, and use it to set priorities.
- Contribute to the shared Kubernetes-based platform codebase, including its open-source path, alongside your own team's systems.
What we need to see:
- BS or MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or a related field, or equivalent experience.
- 12+ overall years in software engineering, with 5+ years managing engineering teams, including leading tech leads or managers.
- A track record of building and running large-scale distributed systems in production: clusters, platforms or infrastructure services used by other engineers.
- Hands-on depth in at least one of: workload scheduling and resource management, distributed storage and data systems, or Kubernetes-based platforms.
- Hiring and growing senior engineers, and building teams that keep quality high under pressure.
- Experience owning reliability for critical services: on-call, incident response, postmortems and the fixes that follow.
- Clear written communication. You can take a contested technical question across several teams to a decision, and write it down.
Ways to stand out from the crowd:
- Experience with GPU clusters for AI training at scale: thousands of GPUs, large training runs, high-speed interconnects.
- Experience with reinforcement learning or post-training workloads and what they need from infrastructure.
- Contributions to open-source infrastructure projects, or experience taking an internal platform open source.
- Has led teams across time zones.
- Uses AI coding and operations tools in daily work and has raised a team's productivity with them.
224,000 USD – 356,500 USD for Level 3; and 272,000 USD – 431,250 USD for Level 4.
You will also be eligible for equity and benefits.
Applications for this job will be accepted at least until November 8, 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
Manager, Software Engineering at NVIDIA rates 91 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
- Tell me about a research question you investigated. What did you find?
- 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 Research. 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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