Senior Manager, Software Engineering - RL Post-Training Frameworks

Nvidia
US, CA, Santa Clara / US, DC, Remote / US, NY, Remote2026-08-25remote_local

About the job

Can you bring together globally distributed teams and the systems they build into a production-quality reinforcement learning ecosystem for researchers and model builders? Reinforcement learning post-training is where modern AI systems learn to reason, use tools, follow detailed instructions, and act as agents. Making that capability work at scale creates one of the most demanding systems problems in AI: a single RL run ties together inference, rollout, reward and critic evaluation, and training. At frontier scale, these loops have to run reliably across GPUs, CPUs, networking, storage, and open-source runtimes. You will lead the work to build, extend, and harden the rapidly evolving pieces to compose cleanly and scale with the most ambitious RL projects on NVIDIA's platforms.

Responsibilities

Own NVIDIA's RL post-training frameworks strategy, prioritizing investments based on customer impact, ecosystem leverage, technical feasibility, and opportunity cost.

Evaluate architecture and performance claims across training, inference, rollout, orchestration, and the NVIDIA platform to guide integrations that improve RL framework quality.

Turn decisions into measurable execution plans including benchmarking criteria and delivery across open-source frameworks and distributed runtimes.

Recruit and develop managers and senior ICs, create an effective US/APAC operating model, and set clear ownership and decision rights.

Coach engineers to contribute credibly in open-source ecosystems and carry NVIDIA's priorities through high-quality upstream work.

Partner with product management, research, DevRel, customer-facing teams, hardware, CUDA, networking, math libraries, compilers, and external open-source collaborators.

Qualifications

Minimum

MS or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience)

10+ years of software engineering experience in distributed systems, AI frameworks, ML infrastructure, high-performance computing, or systems software, with 4+ years as an engineering manager for software teams

Strong technical background in distributed AI systems, including the ability to reason across training, inference, orchestration, and end-to-end performance, and challenge architecture and performance tradeoffs with senior engineers

Experience defining domain-level technical strategy, making build-vs-buy or upstream-vs-internal investment decisions, and creating multi-team execution plans

Ability to drive engineering work across organizational boundaries, influence without direct authority, and communicate tradeoffs clearly to senior leaders and executives

Experience hiring and leading engineering teams, developing technical leaders or new managers, and creating staffing plans for constantly evolving technical domains

Experience establishing workflows, success criteria, metrics, or decision gates that improve engineering execution across teams

Background collaborating with open-source communities, research teams, external partners, or customer-facing teams

Preferred

Hands-on experience with RL post-training frameworks or algorithms such as RLHF, PPO, GRPO, DPO, reward modeling, VeRL, Miles, Slime, SkyRL, OpenRLHF, NeMo-Aligner, or TorchTitan

Background with runtime and orchestration systems such as Ray, Monarch, Kubernetes, Slurm, or comparable actor- and task-based systems

Experience scaling workloads across thousands of GPUs or heterogeneous systems, including fault tolerance, elastic recovery, stragglers, resource contention, or benchmark reproducibility

Familiarity with NVIDIA platform components such as CUDA, NCCL, cuDNN, TensorRT-LLM, Transformer Engine, Nsight, NeMo, or Megatron-Core

Demonstrated ability to turn customer or partner needs into reusable upstream improvements rather than one-off support