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Regarding "Senior Cloud Infrastructure Development Engineer" role at Nvidia

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Senior Software Engineer at GitHub9 months ago

Hi everyone,

I'm in the early stages of interviewing for an infrastructure role ("Senior Cloud Infrastructure Development Engineer") at Nvidia. From my initial conversations and research, it seems like the team supports other Nvidia engineers for testing and development. I'll learn more in upcoming interviews, but I'm curious to hear from the Taro community about a couple of things:

  • Will this role primarily involve only Devops work & tooling, or will it be focused on developing services and tools?
  • Given my background in backend and distributed systems, would a non-revenue-generating role like this offer good growth opportunities at Nvidia?

Any insights you can share about similar roles at Nvidia would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

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Discussion

(4 comments)
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    Supportive Tarodactyl
    Taro Community
    9 months ago

    I have worked as a Cloud Infrastructure engineer for the last 4 years now, I think its safe to say you would be solely working on building and automating infrastructure, developer tooling and working on optimisations using scripting , cost reduction, compute infrastructure etc. This role wouldn't involve developing services.
    I think it has a huge scope for growth given how important infrastructure is.

  • 0
    Profile picture
    Tech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
    9 months ago

    This feels both fairly specific and vague: What have you been able to get from Glassdoor, Blind, the JD, and the recruiter?

    Given my background in backend and distributed systems, would a non-revenue-generating role like this offer good growth opportunities at Nvidia?

    You seem infra-adjacent, so I think you'll be fine. If you're operating comfortably at senior, the differences shouldn't be too meaningful as you should be able to pick up new stuff on the fly.

    Also, it's hard for an infrastructure role not to be revenue-generating or just 1-2 layers removed. A classic infrastructure workstream is to make optimizations to remove costs, especially in this economy where every Big Tech company is trying to do "year of efficiency".

    • 0
      Profile picture
      Senior Software Engineer [OP]
      GitHub
      9 months ago

      Hi Alex - Thanks for responding.

      The JD is this
      "NVIDIA is looking for a senior software engineer to work on a private cloud system used for infrastructure services across multiple teams at NVIDIA. As a team we work with various groups within NVIDIA such as Graphics Processors, Mobile Processors, Deep Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Vehicles and Omniverse to cater to their various infrastructure needs. These cloud services will be scaled to run on thousands of servers and running millions of automated jobs per day helping with the efficiency of thousands of NVIDIA's software engineers worldwide. As part of these services, we host heterogeneous mix of machines with various operating systems (Windows/Linux/Android), multitude of hardware platforms (x86/ARM) having both NVIDIA GPUs and Tegra Processors."

      My one worry is that the private cloud is for other NVIDIA engineers, so I am thinking it might be having less scope/complexity issues as compared to say the services in Azure which are public facing, which is the other thing I am comparing to.

      I haven't completed the interview process yet, so I don't have salary information. However, before getting to that stage, I want to be confident about the growth opportunities this role provides.

    • 1
      Profile picture
      Tech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
      9 months ago

      Okay, this seems like an internal-facing team, but I wouldn't let that hurt your perception of the role. At the scale of an Nvidia, Meta, Google, etc, there are so many engineers that teams like these can easily have senior/staff/principal scope. There were many E7s/E8s at Meta (senior staff/principal) who literally only worked on internal tools. Being customer-facing isn't pure upside either as interfacing with them can be incredibly annoying. More thoughts here: "Between platform (serving developers) and product teams (serving end customers), what should be one's preference based on level?"

      However, before getting to that stage, I want to be confident about the growth opportunities this role provides.

      Growth opportunities are far less dependent on the role/space and far more dependent on the quality of manager. I've seen great managers take relatively dry areas and create lots of scope. Conversely, I've seen terrible managers take scope-rich areas and have their teams land 0 impact within it.

      My advice is to really pay attention when talking to the hiring manager and do a good job reverse interviewing them. People don't leave companies or orgs, they leave managers πŸ˜‰

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