NVIDIA is hiring an accomplished Developer Relations Manager to lead technical engagement efforts across the U.S. defense autonomy ecosystem. You will engage with ISVs, primes, and venture-backed disruptors advancing autonomous aerial platforms, counter-UAS systems, and collaborative combat aircraft. Your work will involve close interaction with engineering teams defining how autonomous drones perceive, decide, and take action. This covers edge inference on the airframe, coordination among multiple agents in contested airspace, and the simulation environments used to train and validate these systems before flight.
You will collaborate with autonomy-focused software vendors, defense primes, and emerging drone manufacturers. You will promote NVIDIA's accelerated computing stack, including Jetson Thor and Orin at the edge. Other technologies are Holoscan for sensor processing, Isaac for autonomy, Omniverse and Isaac Sim for synthetic training, and the full CUDA‑X software layer. This work supports critical uncrewed systems programs. The ideal candidate has deep technical credibility in robotics, onboard autonomy, or flight software. They have a proven record of influencing partner roadmaps and delivering production autonomy stacks on DoD timelines.
You must be a U.S. Citizen to apply for this position.
What You'll Be Doing:
Build and maintain deep technical expertise in autonomous drone mission workloads. These include visual-inertial odometry and SLAM in GPS-denied environments. Also cover multi-modal sensor fusion using EO/IR, SAR, LiDAR, and RF. Include onboard target detection and tracking, swarm and teaming behaviors, and mission-level planning under degraded communications.
Embed with federal autonomy ISVs, drone OEMs, and prime contractors to architect, prototype, and integrate the NVIDIA software stack-Jetson, Holoscan, Isaac ROS, TensorRT, DeepStream, and cuOpt-into flight‑ready autonomy pipelines optimized for SWaP‑constrained airframes.
Lead partner engineering teams through onboarding and integration. Deliver reference architectures, optimized perception and planning pipelines, sample code, and production-grade autonomy workflows. These workflows must be deployable on Group 1-5 platforms.
Observe the autonomy ecosystem to spot new opportunities in collaborative combat aircraft, loitering munitions, counter‑UAS, ISR, and human‑machine teaming. Provide insights to NVIDIA engineering and product teams to guide roadmaps for Jetson Thor, Isaac, and Holoscan.
Engage senior technical leaders-including Chief Architects, CTOs, and autonomy platform leads-across the Aerospace & Defense sector. Tackle sophisticated architectural challenges such as deterministic edge processing, certification‑ready software stacks, and safe autonomy at mission scale.
Run technical workshops, hackathons, and hands‑on enablement programs that rapidly onboard autonomy engineers to the NVIDIA stack.
Partner with NVIDIA Account Managers, industry business development leaders, Solutions Architects, and federal system integrators supporting major autonomy programs, including Replicator, CCA, NGAD, and broader Joint Force initiatives.
Support development of AI blueprints and reference builds for autonomous systems, spanning synthetic data generation in Isaac Sim and Omniverse through on‑platform inference and fleet‑level mission analytics.
What We Need to See:
Bachelor's or Master's (or equivalent experience) in Computer Science, Robotics, Aerospace/Controls, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
15+ years in the technology industry overall, with 7+ years hands-on in robotics, autonomy, flight software, perception, or edge AI - ideally including time at a defense autonomy company, drone OEM, or an autonomy-heavy program office.
Proven technical depth in GPU-accelerated autonomy software: CUDA, TensorRT, Isaac ROS / ROS 2, Holoscan, DeepStream, and on-device model optimization for Jetson-class hardware.
Proven experience in architecting real-time perception, sensor fusion, and planning stacks for SWaP-constrained airborne platforms. It includes onboard inference, multi-sensor time synchronization, and mission autonomy when communications are degraded or denied.
History of leading developer programs, reference integrations, or ecosystem partnerships with defense ISVs, primes, or venture-backed autonomy companies.
Strong ability to translate between engineering depth and senior-executive strategy across program offices, primes, and mission owners.
Ways to Stand Out from the crowd:
Direct experience shipping autonomy software on a Group 2-5 UAS, a loitering munition, a counter-UAS system, or a coordinated strike aircraft.
Background in multi-agent / swarm autonomy, behavior trees, or mission-level AI planners.
Experience with synthetic data pipelines, sim-to-real, or digital twin workflows for training and validating perception and policy models.
Familiarity with DoD software acquisition pathways, cATO/RMF, and the realities of deploying AI on classified networks and tactical edge hardware.
Active clearance (Secret or above) or eligibility to acquire one.
With competitive salaries and a generous benefits package, we are known as one of the world's most desirable employers. NVIDIA has some of the most forward-thinking and hardworking people working together to advance accelerated computing and AI. If you are a creative and autonomous technologist passionate about working with developers and crafting the future of AI in the public sector, we want to hear from you!
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.
Applications for this job will be accepted at least until May 2, 2026.
This posting is for an existing vacancy.
NVIDIA uses AI tools in its recruiting processes.
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.
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