Career Area:
Technology, Digital and Data
Job Description:
Your Work Shapes the World at Caterpillar Inc.
When you join Caterpillar, you're joining a global team who cares not just about the work we do – but also about each other. We are the makers, problem solvers, and future world builders who are creating stronger, more sustainable communities. We don't just talk about progress and innovation here – we make it happen, with our customers, where we work and live. Together, we are building a better world, so we can all enjoy living in it.
Summary
At Caterpillar, technology has a purpose: to solve our customers' toughest challenges. Construction autonomy and Physical AI require trusted digital twins, high-fidelity simulation, scalable GPU computing, intelligent automation, and rigorous validation.
This Principal Engineer role is a hands-on technical leadership position responsible for architecture, critical implementation, engineering standards, cross-team alignment, and mentoring.
Role Purpose
Lead production-grade agentic AI and automation capabilities that help engineers create environments, configure experiments, execute simulations, analyze results, and make informed engineering decisions.
What You Will Do
● Define the architecture for agentic simulation and multi-agent engineering workflows.
● Build agents that interact with simulation engines, digital twins, APIs, datasets, and engineering tools.
● Lead automated map-to-simulation, site-to-simulation, scenario-generation, and experiment-planning workflows.
● Apply foundation models and multimodal AI to simulation configuration, monitoring, troubleshooting, analysis, and reporting.
● Establish tool calling, workflow state, memory, human approvals, guardrails, observability, and auditability.
● Create evaluation frameworks for accuracy, reliability, reproducibility, latency, cost, safety, and task completion.
● Integrate AI services with NVIDIA Omniverse, Isaac Sim, OpenUSD, Cosmos, databases, knowledge systems, and cloud services.
● Deploy and scale GPU inference and agent workloads on CoreWeave and Kubernetes
Principal-Level Leadership Expectations
● Own a major technical capability across multiple teams and programs.
● Translate ambiguous business and engineering problems into scalable architectures and production software.
● Lead architecture reviews, technical investigations, design decisions, and engineering standards.
● Balance research and prototyping with secure, maintainable, production-ready delivery.
● Mentor senior and developing engineers and support technical hiring and onboarding.
● Partner across simulation, robotics, autonomy, controls, AI, data, cloud, product, and customer-facing organizations.
Required Skills and Experience
● Advanced software engineering experience using Python and one or more of C++, C#, Java, Go, or Node.js.
● Experience with APIs, distributed systems, containers, automated testing, CI/CD, source control, and observability.
● Experience with cloud platforms and cloud-native architectures, including Docker and Kubernetes.
● Demonstrated ability to lead architecture and technical delivery across multiple teams.
● Strong communication, mentoring, problem-solving, and cross-functional collaboration skills.
● Experience using AI-assisted development tools such as GitHub Copilot, Claude, or Cursor.
● Experience designing and delivering production agentic AI, generative AI, or intelligent automation systems.
● Experience with NVIDIA NIM, NeMo, Nemotron, or comparable foundation-model and inference ecosystems.
● Experience with NVIDIA Cosmos or comparable world foundation models for Physical AI, scenario generation, and simulation augmentation.
● Experience connecting AI agents to NVIDIA Omniverse, Isaac Sim, OpenUSD, or other engineering simulation platforms.
● Strong Python, API, distributed systems, event-driven workflow, and backend services experience.
● Experience with RAG, embeddings, vector search, knowledge graphs, semantic data…