Senior AI Engineer, World Foundation Models

NVIDIA NVIDIA · Semiconductors · CA +2 · Remote

NVIDIA is seeking a Senior AI Engineer to work on world foundation models for generating dynamic worlds, focusing on human appearance, motion, and action understanding. The role involves applied research, developing and validating model improvements, and hardening them into production-grade checkpoints. Responsibilities include researching architecture changes, exploring multimodal modeling, improving training/inference efficiency, defining training objectives, developing benchmarks, and translating research into robust implementations. Requires a PhD or equivalent experience, 8+ years of applied research/industry experience, 3+ years in generative models for image/video/audio, proficiency in Python, PyTorch, C++, CUDA, and experience with large model training and inference optimization.

What you'd actually do

  1. Research, implement, and validate model architecture and algorithm changes that improve video generation fidelity, with emphasis on human-centric quality.
  2. Explore and prototype improvements across spatial multimodal modeling, modality alignment, flow-based or diffusion-based video generation, and neural rendering-inspired representations to improve controllability and long-horizon consistency.
  3. Improve training and inference efficiency through architectural and post-training techniques (compute/memory optimizations, distillation, pruning, and compression).
  4. Define model training objectives that improve sim-to-real and real-to-real generalization, especially for human motion, contact, and interaction dynamics across real-world and synthetic/simulation data.
  5. Develop detailed, domain-specific benchmarks for evaluating world foundation models, especially generation and understanding world models that reason about video, simulation, and physical environments.

Skills

Required

  • PhD in Computer Science, Graphics, Computer Engineering, or a closely related field (or equivalent experience)
  • 8+ years of applied research and/or industry experience in vision, graphics, or adjacent ML domains or similar area
  • 3+ years of direct experience designing, training, and evaluating generative models for image/video/audio, with strong fundamentals in modern deep learning
  • Hands-on experience improving generative models with a focus on perceptual quality and temporal stability, especially for generating humans
  • Advanced proficiency in Python, PyTorch, C++, and CUDA with strong research-engineering practices (reproducibility, testing, profiling, experiment tracking)
  • Experience training and debugging large models in multi-GPU and/or multi-node environments and distributed training workflows
  • Practical knowledge of inference/runtime bottlenecks and optimization techniques
  • Strong “eye for quality” and interest in diagnosing visual artifacts (sharpness, texture detail, temporal stability, etc.) using perceptual metrics, human preference signals, or learned evaluators

Nice to have

  • Publications in top conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, CVPR, ICLR)
  • Experience using agentic workflows
  • Experience using AI coding companions

What the JD emphasized

  • PhD in Computer Science, Graphics, Computer Engineering, or a closely related field (or equivalent experience)
  • 8+ years of applied research and/or industry experience in vision, graphics, or adjacent ML domains or similar area
  • 3+ years of direct experience designing, training, and evaluating generative models for image/video/audio, with strong fundamentals in modern deep learning
  • Hands-on experience improving generative models with a focus on perceptual quality and temporal stability, especially for generating humans
  • Advanced proficiency in Python, PyTorch, C++, and CUDA with strong research-engineering practices (reproducibility, testing, profiling, experiment tracking)
  • Experience training and debugging large models in multi-GPU and/or multi-node environments and distributed training workflows
  • Practical knowledge of inference/runtime bottlenecks and optimization techniques
  • Strong “eye for quality” and interest in diagnosing visual artifacts (sharpness, texture detail, temporal stability, etc.) using perceptual metrics, human preference signals, or learned evaluators
  • Proven track record in related research, including publications in top conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, CVPR, ICLR), with clear evidence of impact on model quality or robustness

Other signals

  • developing and validating model improvements
  • hardening them into production-grade checkpoints and recipes
  • human appearance, motion and action understanding
  • disciplined experimentation, robust diagnostics, and repeatable side-by-side evaluation
  • improvements translate into real performance and quality