Principal Systems Software Engineer, Semiconductor Systems Inspection

Job Title

Principal Systems Software Engineer, Semiconductor Systems Inspection

Role Summary

Lead development of production-ready AI systems for semiconductor inspection, focusing on computer vision, multimodal models, anomaly detection, model compression, and deployment optimization for fab environments.

Work on a small cross-functional team to convert research prototypes into robust inspection products used in optical and e-beam inspection, wafer and mask inspection, metrology, and review workflows.

Experience Level

Senior / Principal level. Typical background: 15+ years in systems design and software development, with 4+ years of recent applied deep learning or computer vision experience.

Responsibilities

The role delivers end-to-end AI inspection systems and collaborates with customers and manufacturing teams to deploy them in constrained fab environments.

• Define and prototype system architectures for semiconductor defect inspection across optical and e-beam tools, wafer/mask inspection, metrology, and defect-review flows.
• Advance workflows for multimodal representation learning, model adaptation, domain transfer, and low-data defect understanding.
• Integrate and improve CV and multimodal workflows for detection, classification, localization, segmentation, anomaly detection, nuisance filtering, ADC/ADR.
• Design secure, agentic inspection flows for air-gapped fab environments covering data triage, inference, review assistance, root-cause analysis, and human approval steps.
• Apply semiconductor metrology and process context (CD, LER, LWR, overlay, wafer/defect maps, SPC, yield) to improve model quality and decision support.
• Mitigate noisy, limited, and shifting fab data via tool-to-tool calibration, domain-shift techniques, synthetic defect generation, noise simulation, and augmentation.
• Drive evaluation, failure analysis, monitoring, optimization, and production deployment of research prototypes into customer-ready products.
• Collaborate across research, software, process, metrology, inspection, review, and hardware teams to set priorities for next-generation inspection systems.

Requirements

Must-have technical skills and experience for immediate contribution.

• 15+ years of systems design, architecture, and software development experience.
• 4+ years of recent experience in deep learning, machine learning, computer vision, or applied AI.
• Proficient in Python and modern deep learning frameworks (PyTorch or TensorFlow).
• Experience developing or applying foundational world models in computer vision for classification, detection, segmentation, anomaly detection, or multimodal tasks.
• Proven technical leadership in domain-adaptation approaches relevant to inspection problems.
• Strong analytical skills and effective cross-functional communication and collaboration.

Nice-to-have (short):

• Experience with semiconductor inspection, industrial visual inspection, metrology, defect-review workflows, or manufacturing AI.
• Experience with knowledge distillation, model compression, quantization, pruning, or deployment optimization for edge/production environments.
• Background in anomaly generation/detection with shifting visual distributions and unusual labels.
• Familiarity with NVIDIA deployment tools (TensorRT, CUDA, cuDNN, Triton, DeepStream, TAO Toolkit, RAPIDS) and building end-to-end data/ training pipelines.

Education Requirements

MS or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

About the Company

Company: NVIDIA

Headquarters: Santa Clara, California, USA

NVIDIA is a global leader in accelerated computing, renowned for its innovative solutions in AI and digital twins that transform diverse industries. The company specializes in networking technologies, providing end-to-end InfiniBand and Ethernet solutions for servers and storage that optimize performance and scalability. NVIDIA serves sectors such as high-performance computing, enterprise data centers, and cloud computing, constantly reinventing its products and services to stay ahead in the market.