Director, Software Engineering – Cloud Compute and Infrastructure - CA, Santa Clara, United States
$320,000 - $488,750 USD yearly
Originally posted 9 October 2026 by the employer.
This role involves building the software that makes NVIDIA's growing physical infrastructure available as reliable, secure, and efficient compute services.
About the role
This role leads software teams responsible for NVIDIA's bare-metal datacenters and cloud compute infrastructure, supporting hundreds of megawatts of datacenter capacity. You will build software to provide reliable, secure, and efficient compute services for NVIDIA engineering, integrating hardware, firmware, drivers, networking, and system software on platforms such as Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin.
What you'll do
- Lead software engineering teams for cloud compute, bare-metal fleet management, and CI infrastructure, owning architecture, implementation, deployment, and operations. - Set the technical direction for compute control planes, resource provisioning, topology-aware placement, reservations, and capacity management across physical servers, virtual machines, and containers. - Automate the bare-metal lifecycle, including hardware discovery, server bring-up, imaging, firmware and driver configuration, out-of-band management, health checks, reprovisioning, and recovery. - Build CI services that allocate hardware, provision repeatable test environments, record configurations, collect diagnostics, and restore systems to a known state. - Ensure dependability of engineering services while supporting evolving preproduction hardware and software, defining service-level objectives, isolating failures, and improving observability. - Measure and improve hardware onboarding time, provisioning speed, CI queue time, fleet utilization, recovery time, and cost efficiency. - Partner with hardware, firmware, drivers, networking, storage, security, and validation teams to onboard platforms and diagnose failures across system boundaries.
What you'll need
- 15+ years of experience in software engineering, distributed systems, or cloud infrastructure, including 7+ years leading engineering teams and managing engineering managers. - Direct engineering ownership of underlying services of a public or private compute cloud, such as AWS EC2, Google Compute Engine, Azure Compute, OCI Compute, or a comparable infrastructure-as-a-service platform. - Strong technical depth in distributed systems, Linux, virtualization, containers, and networking and storage services for large compute fleets. - Experience building software and automation for bare-metal infrastructure, including server provisioning, hardware inventory, firmware or operating-system lifecycle management, and recovery across heterogeneous systems. - Experience running production infrastructure with demanding availability requirements, including failure isolation, incident response, observability, and reliable deployment and recovery mechanisms. - Ability to guide architecture, evaluate implementation choices, and debug complex interactions among hardware, firmware, drivers, operating systems, and distributed services. - A degree in computer science, computer engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent experience.
Skills: cloud compute, bare-metal fleet management, CI infrastructure, resource provisioning, distributed systems
This role has been open 1 day — well below the 53-day median for Infrastructure/Platform Software roles.
Infrastructure/Platform Software · Infrastructure Platform
|
Open roles in category
923
|
Median days open
53 d
|
Median salary
$229k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | NVIDIA | All employers we track in this specialty (923 roles · 86 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 255 | 923 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 949 | 6028 · 146 employers |
| Median days open | 46 d | 53 d (−7 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $229k |
Skills observed across this category: cloud compute, bare-metal fleet management, CI infrastructure, resource provisioning, distributed systems
Who's hiring in this category
- NVIDIA (this employer) · 255 open roles · median 48 d
- Qualcomm · 60 open roles · median 60 d
- AMD · 51 open roles · median 30 d
- Graphcore · 44 open roles · median 86 d
- Cerebras · 39 open roles · median 76 d
- Intel Corporation · 36 open roles · median 15 d
How we counted: 923 open Infrastructure/Platform Software (Infrastructure Platform) roles from 86 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 11 Oct 2026. Specialty figures count only roles carrying this exact specialty label, so an employer's related work in neighbouring specialties is not included there — it is counted in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family row. Figures refresh nightly.