Applied ML Director — Lead AI Agents for EDA

Cadence Design Systems; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 179,000 - 332,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bonus eligibility

Equity

401(k) plan

Medical/dental/vision coverage

Paid vacation & holidays

Job summary

Cadence Design Systems seeks an Applied ML Director for the ChipStackSuperAgentTeam to lead ML and software engineers in designing, implementing, and evaluating AI agents that boost productivity across the semiconductor design lifecycle.

This player-coach role combines hands-on architecture and coding with team mentoring, shaping the technical roadmap for agent infrastructure, evaluation systems, and production-grade AI within Cadence’s EDA ecosystem.

Qualifications

• MS or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related technical field.
• 3+ years of direct engineering management or formal technical lead experience with mentoring engineers.
• 7+ years of hands-on software engineering and ML experience, including design, refactoring, debugging, and testing distributed systems.
• Deep understanding of large language models (LLMs) and deploying them in production (latency, cost, reliability, monitoring).
• Experience designing rigorous evaluation frameworks for AI systems, including benchmarking and regression testing.

Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor a high-performing team of ML and software engineers.
• Hands-on technical leadership: contribute to codebase and design scalable AI agent infra.
• Architect production AI: guide evaluation frameworks, data pipelines, retrieval systems (RAG), and context-engineering strategies.
• Oversee CI, automated testing, and observability systems; make architectural decisions for performance, cost, and reliability.
• Collaborate with product, research and core engineering to align AI roadmap with EDA platform goals.

Skills

Leadership experience

ML engineering

Distributed systems

LLM deployment

Evaluation frameworks

Education

MS or PhD in Computer Science/Engineering

Job description

Cadence Design Systems seeks an Applied ML Director for the ChipStackSuperAgentTeam to lead ML and software engineers in designing, implementing, and evaluating AI agents that boost productivity across the semiconductor design lifecycle.

This player-coach role combines hands-on architecture and coding with team mentoring, shaping the technical roadmap for agent infrastructure, evaluation systems, and production-grade AI within Cadence’s EDA ecosystem.