September 3, 2025

Senior Computer Vision, VLM Performance Engineer

Senior • Hybrid • On-site • Remote

$184,000 - $287,500/yr

Santa Clara, CA , +1

NVIDIA is a world-leader in artificial intelligence and computer vision. Our team builds hardware-accelerated computer vision pipelines, cloud services and SDKs bringing the latest AI innovations to data centers, gaming rigs, cars, robots, buildings, medical devices, and more. We are looking for an engineering expert to help us productize and optimize the latest Vision Language Models (VLMs) and their pipelines. Together, we will democratize the use of these amazing models, unlocking all sorts of innovative applications the world is barely dreaming of.

What you'll be doing:

  • Develop, profile and optimize inference pipelines for VLMs and other AI CV models: improve throughput and latency, data loading, pre- and post-processing.

  • Improve the efficiency of VLM models themselves: kernel optimization in CUDA

  • Upstream improvements to SDKs and libraries across NVIDIA and beyond to deliver accelerated computer vision at scale.

  • Promote high-performance AI computer vision across NVIDIA teams and functions (Engineering, Product Management, Marketing, and more).

What we need to see:

  • Master's of Science in Computer Science or Electrical engineering or equivalent experience.

  • 8 years practical experience or equivalent

  • Expertise in AI computer vision (VLMs, Vision Transformers, Diffusion models). Proven track record using its software ecosystem (PyTorch, HuggingFace, vLLM) to develop and release production-grade software.

  • Excellent software engineering fundamentals (source control, CI/CD, testing/validation, packaging, containerization, release).

  • Proficiency with Python, C++ and CUDA (kernel optimization)

  • Experience developing cloud applications (REST APIs, gRPC).

  • Excellent written, visual, and verbal communication to present performance challenges, tradeoffs, and architectural alternatives.

  • Curiosity and drive to learn new technologies and partner across teams and functions.

Ways to Stand Out from the Crowd:

  • Expertise in classical, non-ML computer vision

  • Strong fundamentals with system-level performance: multi-threaded, multi-process and distributed software development.

  • Grounding in mathematical fundamentals such as linear algebra, numerical methods, statistics, and exploratory data analysis.

  • History of creativity and innovation around performance in multiple problem domains.

Your base salary will be determined based on your location, experience, and the pay of employees in similar positions. The base salary range is 184,000 USD - 287,500 USD for Level 4, and 224,000 USD - 356,500 USD for Level 5.

You will also be eligible for equity and benefits.

Applications for this job will be accepted at least until September 7, 2025.

NVIDIA is committed to fostering a diverse work environment and proud to be an equal opportunity employer. As we highly value diversity in our current and future employees, we do not discriminate (including in our hiring and promotion practices) on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status or any other characteristic protected by law.