Senior Software Engineer, Agentic Systems

$184K - $356K Santa Clara, CA, US Senior AI/ML Engineer

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Skills & Technologies

DockerKubernetesPythonRag

About This Role

AI job market dashboard showing open roles by category

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help build NeMo Platform, NVIDIA’s product for developing, evaluating, deploying, and operating AI systems at scale. This role will focus on NeMo Evaluator, which helps teams understand whether changes to AI agents are making those agents better. As AI systems become more autonomous and more deeply integrated into real workflows, teams need practical infrastructure for observing behavior, measuring progress, catching regressions, and iterating with confidence.

Our roadmap is increasingly focused on agentic development and automated agent improvement: giving teams the infrastructure they need to compare versions, understand behavior, and make empirically grounded improvements over time.

What you'll be doing:

  • Design and implement Python\-first APIs, SDK workflows, and plugin interfaces for building, measuring, and improving agents across multiple runtimes and product surfaces
  • Build reusable systems for observing behavior, measuring progress, detecting regressions, and turning runtime evidence into product decisions
  • Build systems for ingesting, normalizing, validating, and analyzing agent execution data and evaluation datasets
  • Partner with research, product, platform, and infrastructure teams to integrate agentic capabilities broadly across NVIDIA agent runtimes and developer workflows
  • Help turn emerging agent development and improvement techniques into reliable, reusable product capabilities
  • Improve reliability, observability, debuggability, and performance across NeMoStack services, SDKs, plugins, jobs, and developer workflows
  • Build strong test coverage across unit, integration, E2E, Docker, and Kubernetes workflows
  • Drive “speed of light” engineering: fast iteration, high ownership, pragmatic decisions, and performance\-minded implementation under production constraints
  • Provide senior technical leadership through design reviews, code reviews, mentoring, and ownership of ambiguous cross\-component problems

What we need to see:

  • BS, MS, or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field
  • 5\+ years of professional software engineering experience building production systems
  • Excellent Python engineering skills, including API design, typing, testing, debugging, performance analysis, and maintainable software design
  • Experience designing SDKs, libraries, plugins, CLIs, or other developer\-facing interfaces
  • Experience with distributed systems, cloud\-native services, containers, Kubernetes, or job orchestration
  • Strong understanding of reliability, scalability, security, and performance tradeoffs in production infrastructure
  • Experience with structured data modeling and validation systems such as Pydantic, typed schemas, event/trace models, or SDK\-generated types
  • Ability to work independently, define technical scope, break down ambiguous problems, and drive work across team boundaries
  • Clear communication skills and a track record of collaborating with engineering, product, research, or customer\-facing teams

Ways to stand out from the crowd:

  • Experience building, deploying, and iterating on production agentic AI systems where evaluation was used to measure and improve real product outcomes
  • Experience designing evaluation workflows for heterogeneous agents, including tool\-using agents, RAG agents, workflow agents, coding agents, or long\-running autonomous systems
  • Experience integrating evaluation capabilities across multiple products, runtimes, or internal platforms, especially through Python SDKs, plugins, or shared developer tooling
  • Strong ability to connect technical evaluation work to business outcomes, product quality, user experience, reliability, or operational efficiency
  • Experience with enterprise AI systems where measurement, regression testing, observability, governance, and continuous improvement are required for production deployment

NVIDIA is widely considered to be one of the technology world’s most desirable employers. We have some of the most forward\-thinking and hardworking people in the world working for us. If you’re passionate about leading breakthrough AI research and building exceptional teams that shape the future of computing, we want to hear from you.

Your base salary will be determined based on your location, experience, and the pay of employees in similar positions. The base salary range is 184,000 USD \- 287,500 USD for Level 4, and 224,000 USD \- 356,500 USD for Level 5\.

You will also be eligible for equity and benefits.

Applications for this job will be accepted at least until June 1, 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.

Salary Context

This $184K-$356K range is above the 75th percentile for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $181K across 1996 roles with salary data).

View full AI/ML Engineer salary data →

Role Details

Company NVIDIA
Title Senior Software Engineer, Agentic Systems
Location Santa Clara, CA, US
Category AI/ML Engineer
Experience Senior
Salary $184K - $356K
Remote No

About This Role

AI/ML Engineers build and deploy machine learning models in production. They work across the full ML lifecycle: data pipelines, model training, evaluation, and serving infrastructure. The role has evolved significantly over the past two years. Where ML Engineers once spent most of their time on model architecture, the job now tilts heavily toward inference optimization, cost management, and integrating LLM capabilities into existing systems. Companies want engineers who can ship production systems, and the experimenter-only role is fading fast.

Day-to-day, you're writing training pipelines, debugging data quality issues, setting up evaluation frameworks, and figuring out why your model performs differently in staging than it did on your dev set. The best ML engineers are obsessive about reproducibility and measurement. They instrument everything. They know that a model is only as good as the data feeding it and the infrastructure serving it.

Across the 3,824 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 71% of the market. At NVIDIA, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.

Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.

What the Work Looks Like

A typical week might include: debugging a data pipeline that's silently dropping 3% of training examples, running A/B tests on a new model version, writing documentation for a feature flag system that lets you roll back model deployments, and reviewing a junior engineer's PR for a new evaluation metric. Meetings tend to be cross-functional since ML touches product, engineering, and data teams.

Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.

Skills Required

Docker (10% of roles) Kubernetes (12% of roles) Python (51% of roles) Rag (23% of roles)

Python and PyTorch dominate the requirements. Most roles expect experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and familiarity with ML frameworks like TensorFlow or JAX. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) has become a top-3 skill requirement as companies integrate LLMs into their products. Docker and Kubernetes show up in about a third of postings, reflecting the production focus of the role.

Beyond the core stack, employers increasingly want experience with experiment tracking tools (MLflow, Weights & Biases), feature stores, and vector databases. Fine-tuning experience is valuable but less common than you'd think from reading Twitter. Most production LLM work is RAG and prompt engineering, not fine-tuning. If you have both, you're in a strong position.

Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.

Compensation Benchmarks

AI/ML Engineer roles pay a median of $178,940 based on 11,900 positions with disclosed compensation. Senior-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $227,400. This role's midpoint ($270K) sits 51% above the category median. Disclosed range: $184K to $356K.

Across all AI roles, the market median is $200,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $253,000. The 90th percentile reaches $307,500. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Engineering Manager ($293,500) and AI Safety ($274,200). By seniority level: Entry: $97,380; Mid: $160,000; Senior: $227,400; Director: $243,000; VP: $250,000.

NVIDIA AI Hiring

NVIDIA has 22 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI Software Engineer, AI/ML Engineer, AI Product Manager, MLOps Engineer. Positions span Austin, TX, US, Santa Clara, CA, US, CA, US. Compensation range: $224K - $379K.

Location Context

Across all AI roles, 16% (613 positions) offer remote work, while 3,187 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: New York (2,448 roles, $210,000 median); San Francisco (1,990 roles, $253,000 median); Los Angeles (1,686 roles, $189,000 median).

Career Path

Common paths into AI/ML Engineer roles include Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Research Engineer.

From here, career progression typically leads toward ML Architect, AI Engineering Manager, Principal ML Engineer.

The fastest path into ML engineering is through software engineering with a self-directed ML education. A CS degree helps, but production engineering skills matter more than academic credentials. Build something that works, deploy it, and measure it. That portfolio project is worth more than a Coursera certificate. For career growth, the fork comes around the senior level: go deep on technical complexity (staff/principal track) or move into managing ML teams.

What to Expect in Interviews

Expect system design questions around ML pipelines: how you'd build a training pipeline for a specific use case, handle data drift, or design A/B testing infrastructure for model deployments. Coding rounds typically involve Python, with emphasis on data manipulation (pandas, numpy) and algorithm implementation. Take-home assignments often ask you to build an end-to-end ML pipeline from raw data to deployed model.

When evaluating opportunities: Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.

AI Hiring Overview

The AI job market has 3,824 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 119 entry-level, 1,813 mid-level, 1,472 senior, and 420 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 16% of the market (613 positions). The remaining 3,187 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.

The market median for AI roles is $200,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $253,000. The 90th percentile reaches $307,500. Highest-paying categories: AI Engineering Manager ($293,500 median, 31 roles); AI Safety ($274,200 median, 51 roles); Research Engineer ($260,000 median, 401 roles).

Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.

The AI Job Market Today

The AI job market spans 3,824 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (2,702), Data Scientist (281), AI Software Engineer (258). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.

The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (119) are outnumbered by mid-level (1,813) and senior (1,472) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 420 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.

Remote work availability sits at 16% of all AI roles (613 positions), with 3,187 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.

AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $200,000. Top-quartile roles start at $253,000, and the 90th percentile reaches $307,500. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.

Category matters for compensation. AI Engineering Manager roles lead at $293,500 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $142,800. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.

The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Python (1,968 postings), Aws (1,203 postings), Azure (882 postings), Rag (877 postings), Gcp (735 postings), Prompt Engineering (587 postings), Pytorch (586 postings), Claude (554 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.

Frequently Asked Questions

Based on 11,900 roles with disclosed compensation, the median salary for AI/ML Engineer positions is $178,940. Actual compensation varies by seniority, location, and company stage.
Python and PyTorch dominate the requirements. Most roles expect experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and familiarity with ML frameworks like TensorFlow or JAX. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) has become a top-3 skill requirement as companies integrate LLMs into their products. Docker and Kubernetes show up in about a third of postings, reflecting the production focus of the role.
About 16% of the 3,824 AI roles we track offer remote work. Remote availability varies by company and seniority level, with senior and leadership roles more likely to offer location flexibility.
NVIDIA is among the companies actively hiring for AI and ML talent. Check our company profiles for detailed breakdowns of open roles, salary ranges, and hiring trends.
Common next steps from AI/ML Engineer positions include ML Architect, AI Engineering Manager, Principal ML Engineer. Progression depends on whether you lean toward technical depth, people management, or product strategy.

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