Software Engineer, Robotics Foundation Models (Contractor) – NVIDIA Robotics Lab Full Time NEW

The NVIDIA Robotics Lab is seeking high-caliber Contractor Software Engineers to join our Robotics Foundation Models team onsite in Santa Clara, CA. This is a high-impact, contract-based role focused on bridging frontier research with production-grade engineering..

We are looking for versatile engineers to specialize in one or more of these four core pillars:

1. Fullstack & Visualization: Building the interfaces that make robotics data actionable.
2. Model Optimization: Improving training and inference efficiency across massive GPU clusters.
3. AI Infrastructure & MLOps: Scaling the pipelines that power our research velocity.
4. Data Quality & Automation: Engineering the “Data Factory” for Embodied AI.

Key Responsibilities by Focus Area1. Fullstack & Operational Intelligence

• Architect and scale high-performance dashboards to visualize high-dimensional robotics metrics, fleet telemetry, and research experiment data.
• Design and develop features in Python and TypeScript to stream complex robotics models outputs to web applications.
• Build resilient APIs and manage complex database migrations to ensure data integrity for massive datasets.

2. Model Optimization

• Partner with researchers to profile and optimize model training and inference performance across distributed GPU clusters.
• Implement strategies for cross-modality transfer, image encoding, and tokenization efficiency.
• Develop low-level performance profiling to maximize GPU utilization and training throughput.

3. AI Infrastructure & MLOps

• Design and maintain high-throughput developer tools and automated frameworks specifically for training and evaluating robotics foundation models.
• Create workflows (Spark, Ray, GCP) to download and preprocess petabyte-scale image, text, and robotics sensor data.
• Develop comprehensive test frameworks (API, integration, UI) to ensure research workflows are 100% reproducible.

4. Data Quality, Evaluation & Automation

• Data Factory Engineering: Design and implement automated annotation pipelines to label massive robotics datasets with minimal human intervention.
• Evaluation Frameworks: Build sophisticated tools to evaluate data quality and diversity, identifying “gaps” in training data that affect model performance.
• Data Integrity: Develop automated QC (Quality Control) systems to filter noise and ensure the high-fidelity data required for humanoid robot learning.

Minimum Qualifications

• Education: BS in Computer Science, Mathematics, Robotics, or a related technical field.
• Production Experience: 3+ years of developing and maintaining production-grade software at scale.
• Tech Stack Mastery: Expert Python. Secondary Language: Proficiency in at least one: TypeScript/React, Go, or C++.
• Engineering Rigor: Proven track record with modern CI/CD, unit/integration testing, and version control.

Ways to Stand Out

• Data Scale: Experience with Spark, Ray, or data versioning tools at the petabyte scale.
• Robotics: Hands-on experience with robotics learning.

Employment Details

• Type: Contractor.
• Location: Onsite – Santa Clara, CA.
• Team: Nvidia Robotics Lab.