Principal Software Engineer (Onboard Infrastructure)

• As a Staff Technical Lead on Onboard Infrastructure, you will help define and build the high-performance, highly reliable foundation of the Nuro Driver
• This role spans Device Platform, Performance, and Onboard Systems, requiring deep technical leadership across sensor and compute integration, onboard runtime systems, distributed execution, and autonomy software performance
• You will architect hardware-agnostic device interfaces, inter-device communication pipelines, runtime APIs, and onboard software platforms that enable Nuro’s autonomy stack to run safely and efficiently across current and future vehicle platforms
• You will also lead system-wide performance and reliability efforts, including latency reduction, resource efficiency, observability, automated validation, and tooling for debugging complex onboard systems
• This is a highly cross-functional and high-impact role. You will partner with autonomy, hardware, safety, validation, operations, and supplier-facing teams to integrate next-generation sensors and compute platforms, resolve reliability and performance issues, and shape the long-term technical direction of Nuro’s onboard infrastructure
• Define and drive technical direction for Nuro’s onboard infrastructure across Device Platform, Performance, and Onboard Systems
• Architect core onboard systems for embedded compute, sensor integration, runtime frameworks, inter-device communication, and distributed execution across current and future vehicle platforms
• Lead system-level performance and reliability efforts, including latency reduction, resource efficiency, memory management, thread/process lifecycle management, observability, automated testing, and continuous validation
• Build foundational libraries, APIs, tools, and frameworks that enable autonomy and infrastructure teams to develop reliable, low-latency, high-performance software
• Develop onboard distributed systems, including high-performance communication between compute nodes, module orchestration, monitoring, logging, diagnostics, and large-scale autonomy/sensor data pipelines
• Diagnose complex, hard-to-reproduce failures across software, hardware, sensors, compute, networking, and autonomy workloads; drive root cause, mitigation, and long-term prevention
• Partner with autonomy, hardware, safety, validation, operations, and suppliers to define requirements, evaluate and integrate next-generation platforms, and ensure safe, reliable deployment
• Translate ambiguous product, safety, and autonomy needs into scalable technical architecture; align teams on design direction, execution plans, interfaces, and long-term platform strategy
• Mentor engineers, establish engineering best practices, and raise the technical bar across Onboard Infrastructure and partner teams

Benefits

• Free Caltrain pass and commuter benefits
• Company stock options
• Work from home opportunities
• Health insurance

• We are looking for a technical leader who can operate across team boundaries, align multiple stakeholders, mentor engineers, and deliver robust systems for safety-critical autonomous vehicles
• Experience building reliable, high-performance software for robotics, embedded systems, autonomous systems, distributed systems, or other performance-critical platforms
• 8+ years of software engineering experience building production-quality systems software
• Master’s degree or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Robotics, or related field
• Strong systems-level expertise, with the ability to reason across operating systems, device interfaces, runtime frameworks, and application-level workloads
• Proven ability to diagnose complex performance, reliability, concurrency, and hardware/software integration issues
• 5+ years of technical leadership experience, including leading complex projects, setting technical direction, and driving cross-team alignment
• Ability to translate ambiguous requirements into scalable architecture and mentor engineers through design and execution
• Strong proficiency in modern C++, with deep experience in concurrency, multi-threading, debugging, memory management, and performance optimization
• Master’s degree or PhD in CS, EE, Computer Engineering, Robotics, or a related field
• Experience with robotics hardware, sensors, embedded compute platforms, or autonomous vehicle systems
• Deep knowledge of Linux, device drivers, computer architecture, kernel behavior, and communication protocols such as Ethernet, PCIe, USB, SPI, I2C, or UART
• Experience with high-performance communication, IPC, networking stacks, logging, monitoring, diagnostics, or data collection systems
• Experience with GPU programming, NVIDIA platforms, CUDA, image processing, machine learning infrastructure, or accelerated compute
• Experience working with hardware suppliers or integrating next-generation sensor and compute platforms