Senior Applied AI Engineer
NVIDIA Corporation · Santa Clara, CA
$152,000–$287,500from the description
Jul 16, 2026
Santa Clara, CA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
This role sits within a chip design AI team, focused on building and maintaining the backend infrastructure that powers LLM-based agents and agentic tools in production. Day-to-day work involves designing scalable systems and APIs, deploying coding agents and automation workflows, and collaborating with research and engineering teams. It suits an experienced software engineer with a strong production mindset and hands-on background shipping LLM-powered applications.
Senior level · 5+ years · Santa Clara, CA · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
Posted 2 times — it's one opening, so apply once.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 2,000 people in the Santa Clara, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 1,500–2,650
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $217,796 (middle half $177,469–$231,052). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (7)
The posting spans two internal levels (Level 3 and Level 4) with overlapping salary bands ($152K–$241.5K and $184K–$287.5K respectively); the max figure of $287,500 reflects the top of the Level 4 band. Both levels are included in a single posting.
MS or higher degree is listed under the primary requirements block but the JD explicitly accepts 'equivalent experience', so the degree requirement is set to None.
Python is described as 'preferred' within the requirements section — an unusual qualifier inside a hard-gate block. It is retained as required given its placement and the centrality of Python to every described responsibility, but this is a judgement call.
Hands-on use of a coding agent (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or equivalent) is listed as a hard requirement; these are captured as alternatives under a single skill.
MCP (Model Context Protocol) and similar integration frameworks appear only under the 'Ways to stand out' section and are treated as preferred.
No explicit office location is stated in the posting; Santa Clara, CA (NVIDIA HQ) is inferred as the most likely base. The role does not appear to be remote.
The alternative occupation code 15-1299 is noted because the role sits at the boundary of applied AI infrastructure engineering and a more specialized AI/ML systems occupation not cleanly covered by a single SOC code.
Read the full posting
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