Principal Architect - AI Factory (Physical AI)
Caterpillar5 days ago
Base Salary
$159k - $259k/yr
Responsibilities
- Define data architecture, domains, canonical data models, data products, and standards for Physical AI and autonomous systems.
- Design application and platform infrastructure, including databases, programming languages, utilities, testing approaches, and processing mechanisms.
- Lead evaluation and deployment of technologies that enhance digital technical capabilities.
- Translate architecture into implementation plans, reference architectures, and standards across platform teams.
- Enable engineers and data scientists to develop, train, fine-tune, validate, and deploy AI models using scalable data and compute foundations.
- Develop data pipelines and platforms for sensor, telemetry, simulation, operational, and synthetic data at large scale.
- Support MLOps, model lifecycle management, simulation-in-the-loop reinforcement learning, observability, reliability, security, and edge inference.
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams, Cat Digital Division, NVIDIA, and cloud providers on enterprise platform standards.
Requirements
- Typically 8+ years architecting distributed AI infrastructure on-premises and in the cloud.
- Experience with multi-node GPU clusters, GPU fabrics, high-throughput AI storage, cluster sizing, and hybrid cloud/on-premises environments.
- Deep Kubernetes experience for GPU workloads, including operators, multi-tenant queues, and quotas, plus technologies such as Slurm, Run:ai, NVIDIA Mission Control, or Ray.
- Experience with distributed training, PyTorch FSDP, TensorRT, DeepSpeed, Megatron, NCCL, parallelism strategies, Nsight profiling, elastic training, and fault-tolerant training.
- Experience building petabyte-scale multimodal sensor-data pipelines, lakehouse or object-storage systems, distributed ETL, data curation, labeling, dataset versioning, lineage, and synthetic-data integration.
- Experience with MLOps and model lifecycle processes including training, fine-tuning, evaluation, registries, deployment, monitoring, and governance.
- Experience with simulation-in-the-loop and reinforcement-learning infrastructure, synthetic-data pipelines, closed-loop evaluation, and large-scale job orchestration.
- Experience with NVIDIA AI infrastructure, model-serving technologies, CUDA, and Jetson or DRIVE-class edge computing.
- Experience with observability, reliability, SRE practices, SLOs, GPU FinOps, security, and governance controls for safety-relevant autonomy software.
- Strong Python skills and working knowledge of C++, containers, CI/CD, Bazel or monorepo tooling, and AWS or Azure.
- Ability to translate architecture into implementation plans and standards and collaborate with platform teams, business stakeholders, and technology providers.
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field is required; a master’s or doctoral degree is preferred.
- Experience with ML infrastructure or data and compute platforms for autonomous vehicles, robotics, or AI Factory reference architectures is a top-candidate qualification.
Benefits
- Medical, dental, and vision benefits, subject to plan eligibility.
- Paid time off including vacation, holidays, and volunteer time.
- 401(k) savings plans, Health Savings Account, and Flexible Spending Accounts.
- Health lifestyle programs, Employee Assistance Program, voluntary benefits, and employee discounts.
- Career development, incentive bonus, disability benefits, life insurance, parental leave, adoption benefits, and tuition reimbursement.
- Full-time onsite work at the Irving, Texas office is required.
- Domestic relocation assistance is available.
- Visa sponsorship is available for this position.
Tech Stack
AnsibleApache AirflowApache SparkAWSAzureBazelC++GrafanaHelmKubernetesMLflowNimPrometheusPythonTerraform
Categories
About Caterpillar
Caterpillar Inc. designs, manufactures, and services construction and mining equipment, diesel and natural gas engines, industrial gas turbines, and diesel-electric locomotives for infrastructure, resource, and energy customers. The public company, founded in 1925 and headquartered in Irving, Texas, sells primarily through an independent worldwide dealer network and provides equipment financing. It operates through Construction Industries, Resource Industries, and Energy & Transportation segments, with shares traded on the NYSE and Euronext Paris.