[Hiring] Principal Engineer - Data Retrieval @NVIDIA

Role Description

NVIDIA is seeking an engineering lead to architect and scale the data acquisition infrastructure that powers our foundation models. This is a hands-on technical leadership role spanning distributed systems, crawl infrastructure, and third-party data ingestion.

• Own the architecture of a unified platform covering:
  • Source discovery
  • URL indexing
  • Crawl frontiers
  • Predictive ranking
  • Scheduling
  • Distributed fetching
  • Ingestion
• Work with storage and scaling teams to design scalable frontier storage and queueing systems with:
  • High-throughput writes
  • Efficient lookups
  • Deduplication
  • Scheduling based on data quality, diversity, and freshness
• Build a continuous discovery loop that extracts links and feeds new candidates back into the crawl frontier.
• Develop a shared crawl execution layer that fetches reliably and politely at scale, handling dynamic websites while keeping resource use under control.
• Build extensible pipelines for:
  • Open-web
  • Licensed
  • Partner content
• Define stable interfaces for source connectors so teams can add sources without rebuilding the platform.
• Partner with parsing and curation teams to preserve valuable code, math, and structured content, and improve accepted data yield.
• Implement provenance and policy enforcement with legal, privacy, security, and data governance partners.
• Own production readiness, including:
  • Capacity planning
  • Observability
  • Fault tolerance
  • Recovery
  • Cost efficiency
• Work with research and product teams to evaluate internal crawls and external datasets through comparable pilots.
• Coordinate dependencies across teams and make clear tradeoffs between immediate data delivery and long-term platform development.

Qualifications

• A BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent experience.
• 15+ years of relevant experience in software engineering, including:
  • Designing and operating large-scale distributed systems
  • Setting technical direction
  • Delivering complex infrastructure across multiple teams
• Deep experience with web crawling or closely related discovery, indexing, or ingestion infrastructure.
• Strong hands-on engineering and system design skills.
• Experience building batch or streaming pipelines and reasoning about:
  • Consistency
  • Retries
  • Duplicate processing
  • Backpressure
  • Recovery
• Experience delivering data platforms for research, ML, search, or other demanding technical users.
• Strong technical communication and leadership through influence across engineering, product, research, and governance teams.

Requirements

• Experience architecting a web-wide crawl platform, scaling crawl frontier storage, or consolidating multiple acquisition systems into shared infrastructure.
• Direct experience supplying foundation-model pretraining data.
• Experience implementing publisher consent, training-use opt-outs, dataset licensing controls, or provenance infrastructure at scale.
• Background with browser-based or agentic data collection, programmable extraction, and sandboxed environments.
• Experience onboarding licensed or multimodal datasets, building reusable partner integrations, or delivering streaming feeds with low latency.

Benefits

• Your base salary will be determined based on your location, experience, and the pay of employees in similar positions.
• The base salary range is 272,000 USD - 431,250 USD.
• You will also be eligible for equity and benefits.

Company Description

NVIDIA is committed to fostering an inclusive work environment and proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate 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.