Senior Systems Software Engineer, Accelerated Kubernetes Performance and Scale - Dgx Cloud

NVIDIA NVIDIA · Semiconductors · Santa Clara, CA +2 · Remote

This role focuses on optimizing the performance and scalability of AI infrastructure, specifically Kubernetes-based accelerated runtimes for NVIDIA's DGX Cloud. The engineer will lead performance analysis, contribute to Kubernetes architectural changes, improve container latency for inference scaling, and advance the scalability of confidential containers. The goal is to ensure AI infrastructure scales efficiently, minimizes cost, and enables future AI innovation.

What you'd actually do

  1. Lead end‑to‑end performance and scalability analysis across the Kubernetes‑based accelerated runtime stack (control and data planes), including NVIDIA components such as GPU Operator, Network Operator, node-feature-discovery, topograph, dra-driver-nvidia-gpu, and nvsentinel, tracking issues from orchestration down to the metal.
  2. Design and contribute upstream architectural changes to the Kubernetes control plane and related projects to enable reliable operation at hyperscale cluster sizes, doing in the open what today’s hyperscalers typically do privately.
  3. Improve container startup and cold‑start latency to enable smooth, low‑latency inference scaling on Kubernetes across thousands of GPU nodes, ensuring the AI runtime stack scales without creating API server pressure or operational fragility.
  4. Assess, improve, and contribute to open‑source projects that make Kubernetes an outstanding platform for AI workloads (for example, Grove and gateway-api‑inference‑extension), composing their architectures with scalability, resilience, and multi‑node training/inference in mind.
  5. Advance scalability and performance of confidential containers (CoCo) on Kubernetes so encrypted inference workloads meet stringent efficiency and latency requirements in production.

Skills

Required

  • Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Engineering or equivalent experience, ideally in Electrical, Computer Engineering, or Computer Science
  • 5+ years of experience in computer architecture, networking, storage systems, and accelerator‑based platforms
  • Expertise in Kubernetes and familiarity with the broader CNCF ecosystem
  • Deep experience with large‑scale, parallel, distributed accelerator systems and performance optimization of AI workloads
  • Experience with performance modeling and benchmarking for large‑scale systems
  • Proficiency in Golang and/or Python
  • Strong familiarity with the NVIDIA software stack across training and inference
  • Expertise with at least one major public cloud provider (for example, AWS, Azure, GCP, or OCI)

Nice to have

  • Strong operational experience with any one of the Kubernetes distributions
  • Prior experience scaling Kubernetes clusters to ultra-large node and object counts
  • Demonstrated history of working in the open-source community
  • Excellent communication and interpersonal abilities
  • PhD or equivalent experience in relevant areas

What the JD emphasized

  • deep expertise in distributed systems, Kubernetes, containers, and systems performance and scalability
  • broad, hands‑on experience across the stack, including GPU operators, device plugins, distributed inference serving, and major cloud platforms
  • own hard technical problems at large scale
  • scaling AI infrastructure
  • minimizing total cost of ownership
  • reducing cost per token
  • enabling future AI innovation
  • AI factories
  • performance and scalability analysis
  • Kubernetes control plane
  • container startup and cold‑start latency
  • low‑latency inference scaling
  • AI workloads
  • confidential containers (CoCo)
  • encrypted inference workloads
  • large‑scale simulation infrastructure
  • automated, at‑scale workload tests
  • continuous performance and scale testing
  • large‑scale, parallel, distributed accelerator systems
  • performance optimization of AI workloads
  • performance modeling and benchmarking for large‑scale systems

Other signals

  • scaling AI infrastructure
  • minimizing total cost of ownership
  • reducing cost per token
  • enabling future AI innovation
  • AI factories