Principal Systems Software Engineer at NVIDIA

Department: Engineer, Sys SW

Compensation

$272,000 – $431,250/yr

Setup: On-site
Location: California · Champaign, Illinois
Type: Full-time
Level: staff+
Posted: Jul 15, 2026

Description

NVIDIA is hiring a Sr. Principal Systems Software Engineer for its Apache Spark Acceleration group to develop Java, Scala, and CUDA/C++ libraries that accelerate Apache Spark DataFrames and I/O operations, enable interoperability with table and metastore formats, contribute to open-source data libraries, and optimize distributed processing systems. The role requires a computer science or related degree, at least 15 years of software development experience, strong distributed-systems and programming skills, and familiarity with the Apache Spark ecosystem. The base salary is 272,000 USD to 431,250 USD, with equity and benefits, and applications were accepted until July 19, 2026.

Required Skills

Java
Scala
CUDA/C++
Distributed systems
Apache Spark
cuDF
Parquet
ORC
JSON

Additional Information

Minimum Education: Bachelor's, master's, or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a closely related field, or equivalent experience
Required Previous Experiences: At least 15 years of software development experience
Preferred Qualifications: Familiarity with the open-source data platform ecosystem
Meaningful contributions to the open-source community
Database query optimization