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NVIDIA

Senior High Performance AI Engineer, Agentic AI

NVIDIA is hiring a Senior High Performance AI Engineer, Agentic AI in Santa Clara, United States. It pays $152k-$242k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on NVIDIA.

Level's read on this job

  • Builds AI ●●●● is how Level rates this AI engineer role: the job is building AI systems.
  • The posting mentions vLLM 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

vLLM

We are looking for outstanding Senior High Performance AI Engineers to build the next generation of agentic AI systems for the CUDA ecosystem. Our team works across the full agentic AI stack—from training and improving models, to designing agent architectures and multi-agent systems, to building the systems, runtimes, and evaluation frameworks that make them effective at scale.


You will help develop intelligent agentic systems that can reason about, generate, optimize, and operate across NVIDIA's accelerated computing stack. This includes advancing model and agent capabilities, building scalable agent systems and runtimes, developing high-fidelity training and evaluation environments, and co-designing with NVIDIA's libraries, runtimes, compilers, and hardware. You will collaborate closely with internal NVIDIA software, model, and hardware teams to bring new capabilities into NVIDIA products.


What you'll be doing:

  • Design, build, and optimize agentic AI systems for the CUDA ecosystem, including agent architectures, multi-agent workflows, tool use, memory, and orchestration.
  • Build the data, environments, verification, reward, and evaluation systems needed to continuously improve model and agent capabilities.
  • Co-design and optimize agentic systems across NVIDIA's software and hardware stack, from models and inference through compilers, runtimes, libraries, kernels, and GPUs.

What we need to see:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience; MS or PhD preferred.
  • 4+ years of relevant industry or academic experience in AI systems, machine learning, compilers, high-performance computing, or related areas.
  • Hands-on experience in one or more of the following: agent systems, coding agents, reinforcement learning, or modern AI inference systems.
  • Strong C/C++, Rust, and Python programming skills, with solid software engineering fundamentals.
  • Experience with GPU programming and performance optimization using CUDA or comparable accelerator platforms, and the ability to work effectively across system boundaries.

Ways To Stand Out From The Crowd:

  • Track record of building high-impact coding agents, autonomous software-engineering systems, or developer tools.
  • Hands-on experience optimizing and deploying with TRT-LLM, SGLang, vLLM, or Transformer Engine.
  • Deep expertise in GPU systems and performance optimization, demonstrated through benchmark results, deployed systems, publications, or widely used software.
  • Publications or open-source leadership in deep learning, agentic AI, reinforcement learning, compilers, high-performance computing, or AI systems.

With highly competitive salaries and a comprehensive benefits package, NVIDIA is widely considered to be one of the technology industry's most desirable employers. We have some of the most brilliant and hardworking people in the world working with us and our product lines are growing fast in some of the hottest state of the art fields such as Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning and Autonomous Vehicles.

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 152,000 USD – 241,500 USD.

You will also be eligible for equity and benefits.

Applications for this job will be accepted at least until November 14, 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

Senior High Performance AI Engineer, Agentic AI at NVIDIA rates 100 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.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ 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

vLLM

Also common in AI engineer jobs at this level

Pay

This job starts at
$152k
Typical AI engineer job
$183k

This posting starts 17% below the typical AI engineer job. See AI engineer jobs

Questions you could be asked

  1. What's a project where you used vLLM hands-on?
  2. How would you decide a model or AI system is ready to ship?
  3. 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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