Principal Software Engineer, Cloud Infrastructure

NVIDIA•Santa Clara, CA

1d•$272,000 - $431,250

About The Position

NVIDIA is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to drive the architecture and development of bare-metal and cloud compute infrastructure. The organization supports hundreds of megawatts of datacenter capacity and makes its growing physical fleet available as reliable, secure, and efficient compute services for NVIDIA engineering. The NVIDIA GPU Private Cloud provides infrastructure for continuous integration and validation, coordinating and testing hardware, firmware, drivers, networking, and system software on their path to production. Its fleet includes x86 and Arm servers, GPUs, DPUs, high-speed networking, storage, and rack-scale systems, with platforms including Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin. In this senior individual-contributor role, you will combine hands-on software engineering with architectural leadership. You will evolve the OpenStack platform, automate infrastructure operations, and address complex systems challenges across multiple datacenters. The position includes competitive salary, equity, and benefits. The expected base salary range is USD 272,000–431,250, determined by location, experience, and other objective job-related factors. Applications will be accepted at least until November 13, 2026. This posting is for an existing vacancy.

Requirements

15+ years of proven experience in software engineering, distributed systems, or cloud infrastructure, demonstrating leadership in diverse technical initiatives across teams.
BS or MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
Deep experience crafting, developing, deploying, and fixing production OpenStack environments, particularly Nova, Neutron, and Ironic.
Strong software development skills in Python and experience building maintainable services, APIs, and infrastructure automation.
Strong understanding of distributed systems, including concurrency, state management, asynchronous workflows, failure handling, and recovery.
Deep Linux systems knowledge and experience with virtualization, KVM/QEMU, containers, and guest operating-system provisioning.
Proven understanding of cloud networking, including L2/L3 networking, VLANs, overlays, DHCP, PXE boot, routing, and tenant isolation.
Experience with databases and messaging infrastructure supporting cloud control planes, such as MySQL/MariaDB and RabbitMQ.
Experience operating infrastructure with demanding reliability requirements, including monitoring, incident response, system resources, and production upgrades.
Excellent debugging skills across hardware, firmware, operating systems, communication systems, data storage, and distributed services.
Ability to translate ambiguous requirements into technical direction and influence engineering teams across organizational boundaries and time zones.

Nice To Haves

Contributions to OpenStack or related open-source projects, including upstream features, bug fixes, performance improvements, or architectural proposals.
Experience scaling OpenStack across multiple regions or datacenters, including control-plane resilience, fleet upgrades, and workload migration.
Expertise in Ironic, Redfish, BMC integration, and provisioning or recovering large bare-metal fleets.
Experience with Ceph, distributed storage, and storage integration with OpenStack.
Experience with GPU and Arm platforms, PCIe pass-through, SR-IOV, NVLink, InfiniBand, or high-speed Ethernet.
A record of delivering architectural improvements that measurably increase reliability, scalability, utilization, or developer efficiency.

Responsibilities

Own the architecture and lead implementation of large-scale OpenStack infrastructure supporting bare-metal provisioning, virtual machines, and engineering workloads across datacenters around the globe.
Architect and implement Infrastructure as Code frameworks to automate provisioning, configuration, and lifecycle management across OpenStack and bare-metal environments, using version-controlled definitions, automated validation, drift detection, and safe rollback.
Build and improve compute control planes, resource scheduling, topology-aware placement, reservations, and capacity management for heterogeneous hardware.
Develop and extend OpenStack services and integrations, including Nova, Neutron, Ironic, Cinder, Keystone, and Placement, to meet platform requirements.
Improve platform scalability, availability, and performance through architectural changes, profiling, failure analysis, and elimination of operational bottlenecks.
Build safe deployment, upgrade, migration, and rollback mechanisms that minimize disruption to engineering workloads.
Partner with SRE, datacenter operations, security, and product engineering teams to onboard new platforms and resolve failures across system boundaries.