Principal Software Engineer, Performance

Nuro•Mountain View, CA

About The Position

As a Principal Technical Lead on Onboard Performance, you will define and build the high-performance, highly reliable foundation of the Nuro Driver. The role provides 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 so Nuro’s autonomy stack can operate safely and efficiently across vehicle platforms. You will lead system-wide performance and reliability efforts, including latency reduction, resource efficiency, observability, automated validation, and tools for debugging complex onboard systems. Working across autonomy, hardware, safety, validation, operations, and supplier-facing teams, you will integrate next-generation sensors and compute platforms, address reliability and performance issues, and shape the long-term direction of onboard infrastructure. The role also includes aligning stakeholders, mentoring engineers, and delivering robust systems for safety-critical autonomous vehicles.

Requirements

Master’s degree or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Robotics, or a related field.
9+ years of software engineering experience building production-quality systems software.
5+ years of technical leadership experience, including leading complex projects, setting technical direction, and driving cross-team alignment.
Strong proficiency in modern C++, with deep experience in concurrency, multithreading, debugging, memory management, and performance optimization.
Experience building reliable, high-performance software for robotics, embedded systems, autonomous systems, distributed systems, or other performance-critical platforms.
Strong systems-level expertise and 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.
Ability to translate ambiguous requirements into scalable architecture and mentor engineers through design and execution.
Exceptional technical communication and stakeholder management skills, including the ability to influence senior technical leadership, cross-functional partners, and external vendors on high-impact architectural decisions.

Nice To Haves

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.

Responsibilities

Define and drive technical direction for onboard infrastructure across Device Platform, Performance, and Onboard Systems.
Architect 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 work, including latency reduction, resource efficiency, memory management, thread and process lifecycle management, observability, automated testing, and continuous validation.
Build foundational libraries, APIs, tools, and frameworks that enable teams to develop reliable, low-latency, high-performance software.
Develop onboard distributed systems, including communication between compute nodes, module orchestration, monitoring, logging, diagnostics, and autonomy and sensor data pipelines.
Diagnose complex failures spanning software, hardware, sensors, compute, networking, and autonomy workloads; drive root cause analysis, mitigation, and prevention.
Partner with autonomy, hardware, safety, validation, operations, and suppliers to define requirements, evaluate and integrate next-generation platforms, and support 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.