Staff Software Engineer, Onboard Infrastructure

About the Work

• Define and drive technical direction for Nuro’s onboard infrastructure across Device Platform, Performance, and Onboard Systems.
• Architect core onboard systems for embedded compute, sensor integration, runtime frameworks, inter-device communication, and distributed execution across current and future vehicle platforms.
• Lead system-level performance and reliability efforts, including latency reduction, resource efficiency, memory management, thread/process lifecycle management, observability, automated testing, and continuous validation.
• Build foundational libraries, APIs, tools, and frameworks that enable autonomy and infrastructure teams to develop reliable, low-latency, high-performance software.
• Develop onboard distributed systems, including high-performance communication between compute nodes, module orchestration, monitoring, logging, diagnostics, and large-scale autonomy/sensor data pipelines.
• Diagnose complex, hard-to-reproduce failures across software, hardware, sensors, compute, networking, and autonomy workloads; drive root cause, mitigation, and long-term prevention.
• Partner with autonomy, hardware, safety, validation, operations, and suppliers to define requirements, evaluate and integrate next-generation platforms, and ensure safe, reliable deployment.
• Translate ambiguous product, safety, and autonomy needs into scalable technical architecture; align teams on design direction, execution plans, interfaces, and long-term platform strategy.
• Mentor engineers, establish engineering best practices, and raise the technical bar across Onboard Infrastructure and partner teams.

About You

• Master’s degree or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Robotics, or related field.
• 8+ years of software engineering experience building production-quality systems software.
• 5+ years of technical leadership experience, including leading complex projects, setting technical direction, and driving cross-team alignment.
• Strong proficiency in modern C++, with deep experience in concurrency, multi-threading, debugging, memory management, and performance optimization.
• Experience building reliable, high-performance software for robotics, embedded systems, autonomous systems, distributed systems, or other performance-critical platforms.
• Strong systems-level expertise, with the ability to reason across operating systems, device interfaces, runtime frameworks, and application-level workloads.
• Proven ability to diagnose complex performance, reliability, concurrency, and hardware/software integration issues.
• Ability to translate ambiguous requirements into scalable architecture and mentor engineers through design and execution.

Bonus Points

• Master’s degree or PhD in CS, EE, Computer Engineering, Robotics, or a related field.
• Experience with robotics hardware, sensors, embedded compute platforms, or autonomous vehicle systems.
• Deep knowledge of Linux, device drivers, computer architecture, kernel behavior, and communication protocols such as Ethernet, PCIe, USB, SPI, I2C, or UART.
• Experience with high-performance communication, IPC, networking stacks, logging, monitoring, diagnostics, or data collection systems.
• Experience with GPU programming, NVIDIA platforms, CUDA, image processing, machine learning infrastructure, or accelerated compute.
• Experience working with hardware suppliers or integrating next-generation sensor and compute platforms.

At Nuro, your base pay is one part of your total compensation package. For this position, the reasonably expected base pay range is between $235,000 and $352,000 for the level at which this job has been scoped. Your base pay will depend on several factors, including your experience, qualifications, education, location, and skills. In the event that you are considered for a different level, a higher or lower pay range would apply. This position is also eligible for an annual performance bonus, equity, and a competitive benefits package.