---
title: 'Software Engineer, Performance Tooling and Infrastructure at Nuro'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-performance-tooling-and-infrastructure-nuro-mountain-view-tpr5zpp2rzdv'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# Software Engineer, Performance Tooling and Infrastructure at Nuro

- **Company:** Nuro
- **Location:** Mountain View, CA
- **Posted:** 2026-04-07
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://nuro.ai/careersitem?gh_jid=7786521

## Job description

## Who We Are

Nuro believes self-driving vehicles are the most immediate and profound opportunity for AI to drive positive change in the physical world. Safer streets, more time for what matters, and easier access to the world around us, that’s why we’re building a universal autonomy platform: self-driving for all roads and all rides.

Founded in 2016, Nuro is a physical AI company developing Level 4 autonomous driving technology for a wide range of vehicles, use cases, and markets. Powered by the Nuro Driver™, our universal autonomy platform enables the global mobility ecosystem to deploy autonomy at scale, from robotaxis and logistics fleets to personal vehicles.

With years of real-world deployment experience and a flexible, partner-led business model, Nuro is working toward a future where millions of autonomous vehicles powered by our technology help make everyday life safer, easier, and more connected.

Nuro has raised over $2B in capital from Uber, NVIDIA, Google, Softbank, Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, and other leading investors

## About the Role

Nuro leverages many different bench-top systems to evaluate and regression test different aspects of the software and hardware integration layer. This performance simulation platform includes systems

At Nuro, every autonomy code change, from ML model updates to radius of map around the robot to number of evaluated trajectories, must be validated for real-time performance on actual robot compute hardware before it reaches the road. You will own the infrastructure that makes this possible.

Our Performance Simulation Platform is a hybrid benchmarking system: physical bench-top rigs running production robot compute (NVIDIA Thor platform), orchestrated by cloud-native infrastructure (Kubernetes, GCP), automated data pipelines feeding performance metrics into BigQuery and Grafana, pre/post simulation magic, custom tracing and profiling tools, and much much more.

Engineers across the company rely on this platform daily to answer questions like:

- How will my new ML model affect contention on the GPU?
- How does a new data format impact onboard logging rate or network contention as more data might be flowing from through the system?
- How much memory should be allocated for this new module, and how does it fit into the overall system budget?

You'll be responsible for development, integration, and the evolution of this platform — from the bare-metal OS and networking layer through the job orchestration and CI/CD integration up to the data analysis and visualization layer. This is a high-ownership, high-autonomy role on a small team where your work directly gates the release velocity of the entire autonomy stack. You'll be the technical DRI for the platform — setting the roadmap, making architectural calls, representing the platform's needs to the leadership team, and ensuring the system scales through multiple hardware generations.

## About the Work

- Benchmarking Infrastructure: Develop and maintain the job orchestration layer that schedules, executes, and validates autonomy performance benchmarks across a fleet of physical bench-top systems — integrated into CI/CD pipelines as merge-blocking and release-blocking quality gates.
- Platform Reliability & Observability: Build monitoring, alerting, and self-healing automation for the bench fleet. Proactively identify systemic risks — capacity bottlenecks, hardware degradation patterns, infrastructure single points of failure — before they become outages. Track utilization, failure rates, and capacity trends to ensure the platform scales ahead of organizational demand.
- Performance Data Pipelines: Design and build end-to-end data pipelines that capture fine-grained performance metrics (CPU/GPU utilization, memory bandwidth, E2E latency, scheduling jitter) from bench-top runs, process them at scale, and surface actionable insights through dashboards and automated regression detection.
- Statistical Analysis & Experimentation: Work with Data Science to develop rigorous experimentation methodology for performance results from non-deterministic autonomy workloads — including variance analysis, significance testing, and regression detection. Bare-Metal & OS Platform: Guide the SRE team through the OS and system-level configuration of bench hardware — including Linux kernel tuning, boot infrastructure, networking, and hardware bring-up — ensuring the platform faithfully reproduces production robot compute behavior.
- Drive Platform & Allocation Strategy: Own the planning lifecycle for the benchmarking fleet across hardware generations. Partner with engineering and program leadership to negotiate hardware allocation, model utilization scenarios under real-world constraints, and present data-backed trade-off recommendations — balancing testing coverage, user throughput, cost, and SLA commitments against finite physical resources.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with Hardware Engineering, NPI (New Product Introduction), SRE (Site Reliability Engineering), Perception, Behavior, and Data Science teams to translate their performance analysis needs into robust, self-service infrastructure.

## About You

- Experience: 3+ years of industry software engineering experience.
- Software Engineering: Strong proficiency in Python and working proficiency in C++. You write clean, testable, well-documented code and care about long-term maintainability.
- Data Engineering: Experience building data pipelines, ingestion, transformation, storage, and visualization. Familiarity with SQL and analytical workflows.
- Systems & Infrastructure: Deep comfort with Linux systems — you've configured kernels, debugged boot issues, written systemd units, or managed bare-metal infrastructure. You understand networking, storage, and compute at a level beyond "it just works."
- Technical Leadership: Experience setting technical vision and roadmap for a project or platform, driving alignment across multiple stakeholders. You've independently identified the cross-functional partners needed to unblock and deliver, and you've briefed senior engineering leadership on trade-offs and recommendations.
- AI-Native: You treat AI as a core part of your engineering workflow, not an occasional shortcut — you use agentic tooling (e.g., Claude Code) across the development lifecycle and you understand the boundaries of when AI output demands extra scrutiny versus when it accelerates you.
- Bias for Action: Comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast-moving environments where you need to balance long-term architecture with short-term delivery.

Bonus Points:

- Experience with performance engineering, especially around tooling integration (perf, Perfetto, pprof, eBPF, NVIDIA Nsight Systems, NVIDIA CUPTI).
- Experience in robotics or AV, particularly with NVIDIA DriveOS stack.

At Nuro, your base pay is one part of your total compensation package. For this position, the reasonably expected base pay range is between $152,000 and $228,000 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.

At Nuro, we celebrate differences and are committed to a diverse workplace that fosters inclusion and psychological safety for all employees. Nuro is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and expressly prohibits any form of workplace discrimination based on race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristics. #LI-DNP

## About Nuro

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Nuro develops a universal autonomy platform, licensing its AI-first self-driving system (the Nuro Driver) to automakers and mobility providers to power robotaxis, commercial fleets, and personal vehicles.
- **Entity Type**: Private
- **Headquarters**: Mountain View, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2016
- **Founders**: Jiajun Zhu (Co-Founder & Co-CEO) and Dave Ferguson (Co-Founder & Co-CEO)

## Core Business
- Primary industry/industries: Autonomous driving technology, robotics, mobility solutions
- Target customers (B2B, B2C, Enterprise, SMB, etc.): B2B – automakers and mobility platforms (e.g., Uber, Lucid)
- Mission or purpose statement: "To make autonomy accessible to all."

## Products & Services
- **[Nuro Driver™]**: An AI-first, vehicle-agnostic self-driving system comprising proprietary hardware and generalized self-driving software. It is designed to be cost-efficient and scalable across various vehicle platforms (robotaxis, commercial fleets, personal vehicles). Validated with 5+ years of driverless deployments and over 1.7 million autonomous miles with zero at-fault incidents. [nuro.ai](https://www.nuro.ai/technology)
- **[Nuro Toolkit]**: A customizable SDK offering industry-leading autonomy developer tools, infrastructure, and remote assistance, enabling partners to integrate and manage Nuro’s autonomy technology. [nuro.ai](https://www.nuro.ai/technology)
- **Universal Autonomy Platform**: The overarching platform that combines the Nuro Driver and Nuro Toolkit, designed to be licensed by automakers and mobility providers to scale autonomy responsibly. [nuro.ai](https://www.nuro.ai/)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed (private company).
- **Key Metric**: Total funding of over $2.1 billion (as of its Series D in 2021).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Investors include SoftBank Vision Fund, Greylock, Gaorong Capital, and others. Partners include Uber, Lucid Motors, and various auto and mobility companies. [nuro.ai](https://www.nuro.ai/)
- **Growth Signals**: The company has successfully deployed its technology across three US states (California, Texas, Nevada) since 2020. It is expanding globally with offices in Shenzhen, Tokyo, Toronto, and a planned office in Munich. It recently announced a collaboration with Uber and Lucid, signaling a move into the ride-hailing and personal vehicle markets. [nuro.ai](https://www.nuro.ai/)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Proven Safety Record**: Over 1.7 million autonomous miles driven with zero at-fault incidents, backed by industry-first operating permits and exemptions from regulators. [nuro.ai](https://www.nuro.ai/technology)
- **Vehicle-Agnostic Platform**: The Nuro Driver is designed to be adaptable across different vehicle platforms, making it a flexible solution for various partners.
- **Founding Team from Waymo/Google**: Both co-founders were key engineers on Google’s self-driving car project (now Waymo), bringing deep expertise in perception, machine learning, and robotics.
- **Vision for Artificial General Robotics (AGR)**: The company’s long-term vision extends beyond autonomous driving to applying its AI infrastructure and tooling to other physical domains, positioning it as a broader robotics platform.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scaling Autonomy through Partnerships**: Moving from its initial focus on last-mile delivery to licensing its technology to major mobility and automotive partners (e.g., Uber, Lucid) to power robotaxis and personal vehicles.
- **Global Expansion**: Establishing engineering and operational offices in key markets (US, China, Japan, Canada, Germany) to support global deployment.
- **Cost-Efficient, Scalable AI**: Developing a hardware and software stack that uses automotive-grade, cost-efficient components to enable mass-market adoption.

## Why Work Here
- **Impactful Mission**: Employees work on technology that directly aims to make streets safer, reduce emissions, and give people more time.
- **World-Class Team & Culture**: The company emphasizes a culture of "One team," "Find a way," and "1% better every day," with a focus on continuous improvement and collaboration. [nuro.ai](https://www.nuro.ai/careers)
- **Strong Benefits Package**: Includes medical, dental, and vision coverage, fertility benefits, parental leave, flexible PTO, mental health and physical fitness benefits, 401k, and RSUs (equity). [nuro.ai](https://www.nuro.ai/careers)
- **Global & Diverse Work Environment**: Offices in Mountain View (HQ), San Francisco, Santa Clara, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Shenzhen, Tokyo, Toronto, and a planned office in Munich. The company is committed to DEI. [nuro.ai](https://www.nuro.ai/careers)
- **Early Career & Internship Programs**: Offers structured programs for students and early-career professionals to work on real products and make a measurable impact. [nuro.ai](https://www.nuro.ai/careers)

## Sources
1. [nuro.ai - Company Page](https://www.nuro.ai/company)
2. [nuro.ai - Homepage](https://www.nuro.ai/)
3. [nuro.ai - Technology Page](https://www.nuro.ai/technology)
4. [nuro.ai - Careers Page](https://www.nuro.ai/careers)
5. [LinkedIn - Nuro](https://www.linkedin.com/company/nuro-inc.)

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