Software Engineer, Performance Tooling and Infrastructure

About the Role

Nuro leverages many different bench-top systems to evaluate and regression test different aspects of the software and hardware integration layer. This performance simulation platform includes systems

At Nuro, every autonomy code change, from ML model updates to radius of map around the robot to number of evaluated trajectories, must be validated for real-time performance on actual robot compute hardware before it reaches the road. You will own the infrastructure that makes this possible.

Our Performance Simulation Platform is a hybrid benchmarking system: physical bench-top rigs running production robot compute (NVIDIA Thor platform), orchestrated by cloud-native infrastructure (Kubernetes, GCP), automated data pipelines feeding performance metrics into BigQuery and Grafana, pre/post simulation magic, custom tracing and profiling tools, and much much more.

Engineers across the company rely on this platform daily to answer questions like:

• How will my new ML model affect contention on the GPU?
• How does a new data format impact onboard logging rate or network contention as more data might be flowing from through the system?
• How much memory should be allocated for this new module, and how does it fit into the overall system budget?

You'll be responsible for development, integration, and the evolution of this platform - from the bare-metal OS and networking layer through the job orchestration and CI/CD integration up to the data analysis and visualization layer. This is a high-ownership, high-autonomy role on a small team where your work directly gates the release velocity of the entire autonomy stack. You'll be the technical DRI for the platform - setting the roadmap, making architectural calls, representing the platform's needs to the leadership team, and ensuring the system scales through multiple hardware generations.

About You

• Experience: 3+ years of industry software engineering experience.
• Software Engineering: Strong proficiency in Python and working proficiency in C++. You write clean, testable, well-documented code and care about long-term maintainability.
• Data Engineering: Experience building data pipelines, ingestion, transformation, storage, and visualization. Familiarity with SQL and analytical workflows.
• Systems & Infrastructure: Deep comfort with Linux systems - you've configured kernels, debugged boot issues, written systemd units, or managed bare-metal infrastructure. You understand networking, storage, and compute at a level beyond "it just works."
• Technical Leadership: Experience setting technical vision and roadmap for a project or platform, driving alignment across multiple stakeholders. You've independently identified the cross-functional partners needed to unblock and deliver, and you've briefed senior engineering leadership on trade-offs and recommendations.
• AI-Native: You treat AI as a core part of your engineering workflow, not an occasional shortcut - you use agentic tooling (e.g., Claude Code) across the development lifecycle and you understand the boundaries of when AI output demands extra scrutiny versus when it accelerates you.
• Bias for Action: Comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast-moving environments where you need to balance long-term architecture with short-term delivery.

Bonus Points

• Experience with performance engineering, especially around tooling integration (perf, Perfetto, pprof, eBPF, NVIDIA Nsight Systems, NVIDIA CUPTI).
• Experience in robotics or AV, particularly with NVIDIA DriveOS stack.

Pay and benefits

At Nuro, your base pay is one part of your total compensation package. For this position, the reasonably expected base pay range is between $152,000 and $228,000 for the level at which this job has been scoped. Your base pay will depend on several factors, including your experience, qualifications, education, location, and skills. In the event that you are considered for a different level, a higher or lower pay range would apply. This position is also eligible for an annual performance bonus, equity, and a competitive benefits package.