Senior Software Engineer, World Model Systems Engineering - Autonomous Vehicles - CA, Santa Clara, United States
$184,000 - $356,500 USD yearly
Originally posted 29 August 2026 by the employer.
About the role
This role focuses on systems engineering to productize perception, mapping, and localization solutions for NVIDIA's autonomous vehicles. You will work alongside systems engineers, AI applied researchers, and software engineers to define requirements, analyze performance, and validate world model stacks.
What you'll do
- Develop perception, mapping, and localization system requirements from use cases and customer requirements.
- Perform analysis to define performance requirements and allocate performance budgets.
- Plan validation and formulate test cases and critical metrics to ensure compliance with requirements.
- Test performance, triage results, perform detailed analysis, and develop dashboards.
- Collaborate closely with hardware engineering, safety, developers, and product teams to ensure product alignment.
What you'll need
- MS, or PhD in Engineering, Physics, Computer Science, Data Science, or another related field (or equivalent experience).
- 8+ years of systems engineering experience on complex systems, systems analysis (such as error budget creation and scenario modeling), data analysis, and statistical analysis.
- Experience with verification and validation of world model stacks.
- Experience with VLMs, LLMs, and agentic workflows for automated triage, along with data strategy definition.
- Understanding of failure analysis methodologies such as Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) and MTBF decomposition.
- Proficiency with SQL and Python or C++.
Skills: Systems Engineering, world model stacks, autonomous vehicles, SQL, Python
This role has been open 105 days — well above the 61-day median for Systems Software Engineering roles.
Systems Software Engineering · Systems Software
|
Open roles in category
697
|
Median days open
61 d
|
Median salary
$210k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | NVIDIA | All employers we track in this specialty (697 roles · 73 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 136 | 697 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 1004 | 6296 · 145 employers |
| Median days open | 42 d | 61 d (−19 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $210k |
Skills observed across this category: Systems Engineering, world model stacks, autonomous vehicles, SQL, Python
Who's hiring in this category
- Qualcomm · 172 open roles · median 82 d
- NVIDIA (this employer) · 133 open roles · median 42 d
- AMD · 61 open roles · median 50 d
- Mobileye · 25 open roles · median 76 d
- Broadcom · 23 open roles · median 56 d
- Arm Holdings · 20 open roles · median 118 d
How we counted: 697 open Systems Software Engineering (Systems Software) roles from 73 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 21 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.