Principal Software Engineer, Cloud Infrastructure

NVIDIA•Santa Clara, CA

About The Position

NVIDIA is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to drive architecture and development for bare-metal and cloud compute infrastructure. The organization supports hundreds of megawatts of datacenter capacity and provides reliable, secure, and efficient compute services for NVIDIA engineering. Its GPU Private Cloud supports continuous integration and validation, coordinating and testing hardware, firmware, drivers, networking, and system software before production. The fleet includes x86 and Arm servers, GPUs, DPUs, high-speed networking, storage, and rack-scale systems, including Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin platforms. In this senior individual-contributor role, the engineer combines hands-on software engineering with architectural leadership. The role evolves the OpenStack platform, automates infrastructure operations, and addresses complex systems challenges across multiple datacenters. The position owns architecture and implementation of large-scale OpenStack infrastructure for bare-metal provisioning, virtual machines, and engineering workloads across global datacenters. It also develops Infrastructure as Code frameworks, compute control planes, and OpenStack services and integrations; improves scalability, availability, and performance; and builds safe deployment, upgrade, migration, and rollback mechanisms. The engineer partners with SRE, datacenter operations, security, and product engineering teams to onboard platforms and resolve failures across system boundaries. NVIDIA offers competitive salaries and a comprehensive benefits package. The expected base salary range is USD 272,000–431,250, determined by location, experience, and other objective job-related factors. The employee is also eligible for equity and benefits. 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 across diverse technical initiatives and 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 Python software development skills 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.
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 architecture and lead implementation of large-scale OpenStack infrastructure supporting bare-metal provisioning, virtual machines, and engineering workloads across multiple datacenters.
Architect and implement Infrastructure as Code frameworks for provisioning, configuration, and lifecycle management across OpenStack and bare-metal environments, including 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, according to platform requirements.
Improve platform scalability, availability, and performance through architectural changes, profiling, failure analysis, and elimination of operational bottlenecks.
Build safe deployment, upgrade, and migration mechanisms, including rollback, 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.