Senior GPU Propagation Engine Engineer

NVIDIA NVIDIA · Semiconductors · Santa Clara, CA +1 · Remote

NVIDIA is seeking a senior engineer to lead the design and implementation of a real-time, GPU-accelerated propagation engine for predicting radio signal travel in 3D environments. This role involves architecting and implementing a GPU ray-tracing engine for both planning and real-time scales, focusing on foundational technology for 5G/6G network simulation using NVIDIA's GPU and ray-tracing platforms. The core challenge is enabling sub-millisecond propagation updates on GPU hardware.

What you'd actually do

  1. architect and implement a GPU ray-tracing engine that operates at two time scales
  2. At the planning scale, the engine produces volumetric radio maps — coverage, SINR, and best-server maps at multiple resolutions, composable across cells, frequencies, and beam configurations — that network operators use to design and optimise deployments.
  3. At the real-time scale, the same engine delivers per-link multipath channel updates at the millisecond cadence that a production RAN stack requires, using adaptive algorithms that exploit temporal coherence to avoid recomputing what hasn't changed.
  4. Laying the foundations for real-time ray tracing on GPU hardware — algorithms, data structures, and multi-GPU scaling strategies that make sub-millisecond propagation updates feasible — is the defining technical challenge of this role.

Skills

Required

  • PhD in computer graphics, high-performance computing, computational electromagnetics, or a closely related field (or equivalent experience)
  • 8+ years of relevant experience
  • Hands-on proficiency with CUDA and at least one GPU ray-tracing framework (OptiX, Vulkan RT, Embree)
  • Proficiency in GPU-friendly spatial data structures (BVH, space-filling curves, hash maps)
  • ability to reason about memory hierarchy, occupancy, and compute-vs-bandwidth trade-offs at the kernel level
  • Working knowledge of electromagnetic wave propagation phenomena (reflection, transmission, diffraction, scattering)

Nice to have

  • Experience with real-time or near-real-time ray-tracing engines shipping in production systems
  • Prior work on multi-GPU partitioning for ray-tracing or large-scale simulation workloads
  • Familiarity with 3GPP channel models and wireless network planning tools
  • Knowledge of geospatial coordinate systems and tiling schemes

What the JD emphasized

  • track record of writing production-quality GPU code
  • Impactful publications in GPU ray tracing, real-time rendering, or deterministic propagation modelling