Senior Software Engineer, Spatial Intelligence and Foundation Models
NVIDIA Corporation · Santa Clara, CA
$184,000–$356,500from the description
Jul 15, 2026
Santa Clara, CA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior engineering role focused on building perception and spatial understanding systems for robots — covering areas such as SLAM, structure-from-motion, optical flow, and vision-language models. The work spans on-robot deployment, simulation, and large-scale data pipelines for training foundation models, with close collaboration across robotics and AI research teams. Suits experienced engineers with a strong background in 3D geometric computer vision and deep learning.
Senior level · 8+ years · Santa Clara, CA · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
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 370 people in the Santa Clara, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 95–480
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
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 covers two salary bands: Level 4 ($184,000–$287,500) and Level 5 ($224,000–$356,500). The min/max reported here span both bands combined.
Degree requirement is listed as 'PhD or Master's degree … or equivalent experience', so no hard degree gate is set.
Python and C++ are listed together with 'and/or', making them interchangeable gates — either satisfies the requirement; both are emitted as a single requirement with the other as an alternative.
VLMs (vision-language models) are described as 'a strong plus' within the requirements section, placing them in a preferred rather than hard-gate category.
Agentic tool use (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex) is explicitly called out as a required skill ('strong skills in agentic tool use') in the main requirements block — treated as a hard gate with the named tools as interchangeable alternatives.
GPU cluster training and simulation-based training appear only under 'Ways to stand out from the crowd' (the nice-to-have section) and are therefore preferred.
No explicit work location is stated beyond NVIDIA's headquarters region; Santa Clara, CA CBSA is used as the primary location inference. The role does not appear to be remote.
Read the full posting
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