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 the data, validation, and accelerated-computing foundation required to operate simulation at enterprise scale, connecting physical-machine evidence with virtual-machine behavior through reproducible pipelines and trusted infrastructure.
What You Will Do
● Architect machine-data and simulation-data ingestion, processing, curation, storage, and serving pipelines.
● Define data models connecting machines, digital twins, environments, scenarios, datasets, models, and results.
● Establish verification and validation frameworks, correlation methods, automated regression tests, and quality gates.
● Build synthetic-data generation, automatic annotation, dataset lineage, versioning, and reproducibility capabilities.
● Architect scalable NVIDIA GPU execution across CoreWeave, on-premises clusters, cloud, and HPC environments.
● Operate batch simulation, distributed training, inference, rendering, and synthetic-data workloads using Kubernetes.
● Define observability, security, workload scheduling, cost controls, resource quotas, and failure-recovery practices.
● Establish infrastructure as code and CI/CD for simulation services, models, datasets, and GPU workloads.
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. Principal Engineer Job Description Page 3
● 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.
● Deep experience with CoreWeave or comparable GPU cloud platforms, Kubernetes, Docker, NVIDIA Container Toolkit, GPU operators, scheduling, and workload optimization.
● Experience supporting NVIDIA Omniverse, Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab, Newton, Cosmos, Replicator, training, inference, and synthetic-data workloads.
● Experience with CUDA-aware systems, multi-GPU execution, distributed workloads, job queues, autoscaling, and GPU utilization monitoring.
● Experience with telemetry, time-series, sensor, image, video, LiDAR,…