Principal Site Reliability Engineer - CA, Santa Clara, United States
$248,000 - $396,750 USD yearly
Originally posted 8 September 2026 by the employer.
Work on the AI Platform Runtime.
About the role
As a Principal Site Reliability Engineer, you will shape the technical direction of NVIDIA’s AI Platform Runtime and lead reliability engineering initiatives spanning multiple organizations. You will solve complex, ambiguous problems at enterprise scale and influence how teams design and operate critical AI-powered services.
What you'll do
- Define and drive the long-term technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for reliability across NVIDIA’s AI Platform Runtime and related enterprise systems.
- Architect highly available, resilient, secure, and scalable distributed platforms that power NVIDIA’s AI-driven products and services.
- Establish platform-wide reliability standards, including service-level objectives, error budgets, capacity models, resilience patterns, and operational readiness requirements.
- Advance observability across complex distributed environments through OpenTelemetry, metrics, logs, traces, profiling, analytics, and automated anomaly detection.
- Develop reference architectures, shared platform capabilities, and automation frameworks that can be adopted across multiple engineering organizations.
What you'll need
- 15+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, Platform Engineering, Distributed Systems, Cloud Architecture, or related infrastructure engineering roles.
- BS or MS degree in Computer Science or a related technical field involving significant software development, or equivalent experience.
- Demonstrated experience setting technical strategy and leading large-scale engineering initiatives across multiple teams or organizations.
- Deep expertise in distributed systems architecture, networking, Linux, Kubernetes, and public cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
- Strong proficiency in one or more programming languages such as Python, Go, TypeScript, JavaScript, or Java, with experience building production-grade automation and platform software.
- Extensive experience with infrastructure-as-code and platform automation technologies such as Terraform, Crossplane, AWS CDK, AWS CloudFormation, or equivalent tools.
- Deep understanding of observability at scale, including OpenTelemetry and modern metrics, logging, tracing, profiling, and analytics platforms.
- Expertise in reliability engineering practices, including service-level objectives, error budgets, capacity planning, fault tolerance, disaster recovery, incident management, and blameless postmortems.
Skills: Site Reliability Engineering, AI Platform Runtime, distributed systems, Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure
This role has been open 36 days — well below the 50-day median for Infrastructure/Platform Software roles.
Infrastructure/Platform Software · Infrastructure Platform
|
Open roles in category
973
|
Median days open
50 d
|
Median salary
$235k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | NVIDIA | All employers we track in this specialty (973 roles · 85 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 281 | 973 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 993 | 6140 · 145 employers |
| Median days open | 45 d | 50 d (−5 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $235k |
Skills observed across this category: Site Reliability Engineering, AI Platform Runtime, distributed systems, Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure
Who's hiring in this category
- NVIDIA (this employer) · 289 open roles · median 44 d
- Qualcomm · 61 open roles · median 57 d
- AMD · 57 open roles · median 21 d
- Graphcore · 44 open roles · median 90 d
- Intel Corporation · 40 open roles · median 9 d
- Cerebras · 39 open roles · median 80 d
How we counted: 973 open Infrastructure/Platform Software (Infrastructure Platform) roles from 85 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 15 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.