Lead Compiler Engineer, LLVM/Xtensa – Drive Performance

Cadence; Cork; On-site; EUR 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

25 days holiday per year

Private Medical and Dental plans

Income Protection and Life Insurance

Group Personal Pension Plan

Cycle to work scheme and gym subsidy

5 days paid time to volunteer

Employee Stock Purchase Plan

Great Place to Work© & Fortune 100

Job summary

Cadence, a leader in electronic design, seeks a Lead Software Engineer – Compiler/LLVM to join the Xtensa toolchain team in Cork, Ireland. You will design and implement compiler optimisations for Xtensa and mentor engineers while delivering production-grade tools.

Collaborating with hardware teams, you will work on LLVM/GCC backends, code generation, and performance improvements across AI, DSP, and vision workloads to unlock strong real-world performance.

Qualifications

• Bachelors or Masters in Computer Science, EE, or related field (or equivalent practical experience).
• Typically 4+ years in compiler development or low-level systems software.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement compiler optimisations and features for Xtensa processors.
• Drive improvements in code generation, performance tuning, and architecture enablement across the toolchain.
• Partner with hardware/architecture teams on new ISA features and capabilities.
• Analyze and optimize real-world workloads including AI, DSP, and vision use cases.
• Provide technical mentorship and guide best practices.

Skills

C/C++ programming

Compiler development

Low-level systems software

Debugging

Code optimization

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science or Electrical Engineering

Tools

LLVM

GCC

Job description

Cadence, a leader in electronic design, seeks a Lead Software Engineer – Compiler/LLVM to join the Xtensa toolchain team in Cork, Ireland. You will design and implement compiler optimisations for Xtensa and mentor engineers while delivering production-grade tools.

Collaborating with hardware teams, you will work on LLVM/GCC backends, code generation, and performance improvements across AI, DSP, and vision workloads to unlock strong real-world performance.