Senior Software Engineer, Spatial Intelligence and Foundation Models

Location: US, CA, Santa Clara

Time Type: Full time

Job Description

NVIDIA is seeking a Software Engineer to join our Isaac Spatial Intelligence team within the Isaac Engineering org! You will join a group of world-class robotics software and applied research engineers focused on geometric and semantic understanding, and reasoning for robots — building the perception systems that turn raw sensor data into actionable world understanding, shaping the future of physical AI!

What you'll be doing:

• Design, implement, and deploy novel algorithms for spatial understanding, working on problems ranging from SLAM, structure-from-motion, optical flow, scene flow, and object reconstruction to training VLMs on a wide range of spatial reasoning skills.

• Develop robust perception, mapping, and reasoning systems that run on robots, in simulation, and at scale in data pipelines for training foundation models.

• Advance the state of the art in geometric computer vision, combining classical multi-view geometry and optimization with modern deep learning approaches.

• Train and evaluate vision-language models on skills relevant to robotics.

• Work closely with the Cosmos and GR00T teams on perception and spatial understanding for foundation models and collaborate with other Isaac teams including Sim/Lab, Platform and SQA to deploy, validate, extend and release capabilities & features on physical robots as well as in at-scale simulations.

• Contribute to the effective integration, validation, and release of applied research efforts in collaboration with research teams and on top of NVIDIA's advanced robotics platforms.

• Foster a culture of innovation and collaboration, supporting deliverables such as prototypes, open source software contributions, patents, and publications.

• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, hardware, and software teams to translate engineering work into impactful products.

What we need to see:

• PhD or Master's degree in Computer Science, Robotics, or a related field (or equivalent experience).

• 8+ years of experience working on computer vision, robotics, or deep learning technologies.

• Strong foundation in 3D geometric computer vision: multi-view geometry, visual odometry/SLAM, structure-from-motion, or dense correspondence (optical flow, scene flow, stereo).

• Strong hands-on programming skills in Python and/or C++; experience with Deep Learning frameworks (PyTorch, JAX, TensorFlow).

• Experience training and evaluating deep learning models for perception tasks; familiarity with vision-language models is a strong plus.

• Strong skills in agentic tool use — proficiency working with AI coding agents and agentic workflows (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, Codex) to accelerate development, testing, and experimentation.

• Excellent communication, organizational, and interpersonal skills.

Ways to stand out from the crowd:

• Contributions to widely used SLAM, SfM, or 3D reconstruction systems (open source or shipped products).

• Experience with large-scale model training on GPU clusters, including VLMs or other foundation models.

• Publications at top computer vision or robotics venues (CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICRA, IROS, RSS, CoRL).

• Hands-on experience with simulation-based training and evaluation, sim-to-real and real-to-sim transfer.

Your base salary will be determined based on your location, experience, and the pay of employees in similar positions. The base salary range is 184,000 USD - 287,500 USD for Level 4, and 224,000 USD - 356,500 USD for Level 5.Applications for this job will be accepted at least until July 20, 2026.

This posting is for an existing vacancy. 

NVIDIA uses AI tools in its recruiting processes.

NVIDIA is committed to fostering an inclusive work environment and proud to be an equal opportunity employer. As we highly value diversity in our current and future employees, we do not discriminate (including in our hiring and promotion practices) on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status or any other characteristic protected by law.