Principal Architect, AI Inference Networking - NIXL and Dynamo
NVIDIA is hiring a Principal Architect, AI Inference Networking - NIXL and Dynamo in Shanghai, China. 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 vLLM, Nixl and Dynamo among its tools and skills.
- Level classes it as a lead role.
- NVIDIA has 2,800+ other open roles on Level.
AI in this role
Drive NIXL inference networking adoption and optimize distributed LLM serving stacks and data paths for high-scale AI deployments.
Inference has become a networking problem. With disaggregated serving, where prefill runs on one set of GPUs, decode on another, and KV cache streams between them, performance depends on how fast you can move tensors between GPUs, across nodes, and in and out of storage. Performance is only half of it. These deployments are elastic, so the data path needs dynamic APIs that let workers join and leave, connections form and tear down, and transfers reroute at runtime without stalling the pipeline. NIXL, NVIDIA's open source Inference Xfer Library, is the layer that solves this, and it sits underneath NVIDIA Dynamo and a growing list of inference engines.
China is where some of the world's most demanding inference deployments are being built. We are hiring a senior architect to work directly with the platform teams building them, understanding what breaks at scale and turning that into upstream code and roadmap. You will work daily with core NIXL and Dynamo engineers in Israel and the US.
What you'll be doing:
- Drive NIXL adoption in China, from the first architecture conversation through prototype and benchmark to production rollout and upstream contribution.
- Profile customer inference stacks and fix what's costing throughput and TTFT: KV cache movement, memory registration, transfer scheduling.
- Write NIXL backends and plugins, extend Dynamo integrations, and contribute optimizations upstream to NIXL and GPUDirect class data paths.
- Help define the APIs that make the data path dynamic, supporting elastic scaling, worker churn and runtime rerouting in production inference clusters.
- Bring the region's requirements into NVIDIA's roadmap with enough technical authority to change it.
- Grow the local community around NIXL through talks, benchmarks and reference architectures.
What we need to see:
- M.Sc. or Ph.D. in CS/EE/CE, or equivalent depth earned in industry.
- 12+ years building or optimizing large scale distributed systems: AI inference or training infrastructure, communication libraries, high performance networking, or HPC runtimes.
- Strong systems programming in C++ and Python, with performance critical code shipped.
- Hands on experience with RDMA networking (InfiniBand or RoCE) and GPU memory movement.
- Working knowledge of modern LLM serving, including prefill/decode disaggregation, KV cache management, tensor and pipeline parallelism, and at least one serving stack (Dynamo, TensorRT-LLM, vLLM, SGLang, Triton).
- Strong communication skills, with the technical credibility to be taken seriously by customer engineering teams and by NVIDIA's core library maintainers.
- Fluent Mandarin and professional English, and comfortable working across China, Israel and US time zones.
Ways to stand out from the crowd:
- Open source contributions to NIXL, Dynamo, NCCL, vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM or Mooncake. We will read your commits.
- Inference at genuine scale: thousands of GPUs, multi tenant clusters, strict SLOs.
- CUDA, and comfort reading kernel and driver level code when the answer is down there.
- A community you've built: a project people adopted, a talk people still cite.
You will help shape how NIXL is adopted across China, working alongside the engineers who design the transport layer itself. The work is public, and disaggregated inference is being defined right now.
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.
How we rate this
Principal Architect, AI Inference Networking - NIXL and Dynamo at NVIDIA rates 90 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.
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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 project where distributed systems was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where c was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where python was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where rdma was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where gpu architecture was part of your work. What did you do?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: Distributed Systems, C, Python, Rdma, and GPU Architecture. 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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