Senior Software Engineer, Mapping - Autonomous Vehicles

NVIDIA is hiring a Senior Software Engineer, Mapping - Autonomous Vehicles 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

On Level's scale, this software engineer role is Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
The posting mentions Claude, Cursor and computer vision among its tools and skills.
Level classes it as a senior role.
NVIDIA has 2,700+ other open roles on Level.

AI in this role

claudecursor

computer-vision

Nvidia DRIVE platform offers solutions to build safe, scalable, AI-enabled Autonomous Vehicles. The end‑to‑end full stack platform spans from in‑car supercomputers to cloud‑scale training and simulation. Our goal is to ship cars that continuously learn and improve, bringing the future of self-driving to today’s roads.

We are looking for passionate, AI-powered, engineers for the DRIVE Mapping team. Maps play important roles in localization, routing, and navigation. Maps offer redundancy for live sensor perceptions increasing the safety of the vehicle. In this role, you will help deliver the SD maps to all in-car consumers in the most efficient way. We are seeking the best engineers motivated about solving complex problems for self-driving cars with a background in software design, embedded software, working on real-time software and operating systems. Are you interested in inventing human level AI for navigation in the unconstrained world under any conditions? If so, join us!

What You'll Be Doing:

Design and develop algorithms for map-based driving products
Architecture design for map provider, health monitors and data fusion with perception
Develop highly efficient in-vehicle code in C++14 or later
Design and integrate algorithmic solutions into the core of NVIDIA AV
Research, and develop transformer based models tailored for graphs
Implement evaluation frameworks to measure performance of large scale LLM’s
Analyze and fine-tune SOTA pretrained models on domain specific datasets
Build automated map content analysis in Python, JavaScript or TypeScript
Create scalable and distributed map-building workflows

What We Need To See:

4+ years with BS in Computer Science or equivalent experience
Background in computer vision, 3D geometry and machine learning
Heavy AI user for day‑to‑day development (design, coding, review, and testing)
Hands‑on experience with tools like Claude CLI, Cursor, and other advanced code assistants
Strong prompt‑crafting skills: knows how to break problems down, provide context, and iterate with AI to reach robust solutions
Passion for robotics and autonomous vehicles

Ways To Stand Out From The Crowd:

Prior experience with any navigation maps such as NDS.Live, Open Street Maps (OSM) etc.
Software development on embedded or automotive platforms.
Knowledge of gRPC, Flat Buffers and Protocol Buffers
Experience with GPGPU programming (CUDA)

We believe, realizing self-driving vehicles will be a defining contribution of our generation which can reduce ~1.25 million deaths per year world-wide due to road traffic accidents. We have the funding and the scale, but we need your help on our team. NVIDIA is widely recognized as one of the best places to work. You are invited to do your life’s best work and get surrounded by some of the most forward-thinking and hardworking people in the world!

#AutonomousVehicles

Your base salary will be determined based on your location, experience, and other objective job-related factors. The expected base salary ranges for this position are:
152,000 USD – 241,500 USD for Level 3; and 184,000 USD – 287,500 USD for Level 4.

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

Senior Software Engineer, Mapping - Autonomous Vehicles at NVIDIA rates 85 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

Senior Software Engineer, Mapping - Autonomous Vehicles is an open job at NVIDIA.
Level rates this role AI Level 4 of 4: Builds AI.
The listed salary is $152k-$242k a year.
The role is based in US, CA, Santa Clara.
The job was posted on August 29, 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

Computer visionClaudeCursor

Also common in software engineer jobs at this level

AWS AI agents Kubernetes Java Generative AI RAG

Pay

This job starts at: $152k
Typical software engineer job: $168k

This posting starts 9% below the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs

Questions you could be asked

Walk me through a computer vision problem you solved, from raw data to a deployed model.
Walk me through how you've used Claude in your day-to-day work.
What are the limits of Cursor that you've run into, and how did you work around them?
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: Computer vision, Claude, and Cursor. 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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