Drive upstream-first engineering in vLLM/SGLang: author and land PRs or equivalent experience, engage in development discussions, help compose roadmaps, and build durable maintainer relationships.
Build and implement inference-runtime features that improve efficiency, latency, and tail behavior: request scheduling, batching policies, KV-cache management (paging/sharding), memory planning, and streaming.
Optimize core hot paths across the stack—from Python orchestration down to C++/CUDA kernels—using profiling and measurement to guide decisions.
Improve multi-GPU and multi-node inference: communication patterns, parallelism strategies (tensor/sequence/pipeline), and system-level scaling/efficiency.
Strengthen correctness, robustness, and operability: determinism where needed, graceful degradation, backpressure, observability hooks, and performance regression testing.
Collaborate across NVIDIA to integrate upstream advances with production needs (deployment patterns, compatibility, security posture) while keeping changes broadly adoptable by the community.
Mentor senior engineers, raise the technical bar through build reviews, and establish guidelines for performance engineering and upstream contribution workflows.

15+ years building production software with significant depth in systems engineering
strong track record of owning ambiguous, high-impact technical problems end-to-end
demonstrated expertise in LLM inference/serving systems (e.g., vLLM, SGLang) and the tradeoffs that drive real production performance
strong programming skills in Rust, C++, Python, CUDA; ability to read, modify, and optimize performance-critical code across layers
experience with GPU performance analysis tools and methodologies (profiling, microbenchmarking, memory/comms analysis) and a strong measurement culture
solid foundation in distributed systems and concurrency: queues/schedulers, RPC/streaming, multi-process/multi-threaded runtime behavior, and scaling patterns across nodes
excellent communication skills; ability to influence across teams and represent NVIDIA well in open-source technical forums
BS/MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience)

Principal Software Engineer – AI Inference

Key skills