HPC Software Engineer

Ansys, Inc.; Canonsburg (Washington County); On-site; USD 100,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive health benefits

Financial benefits

Flexible working conditions

Job summary

Ansys, Inc. is seeking a skilled engineer to design and optimize parallel programming methods for its Mechanical solver products. This role requires a strong understanding of HPC software and experience with GPU and CPU architectures.

The successful candidate will collaborate with numerical methods experts and solver developers, leading efforts that enhance product performance and scalability across various industries, including automotive and aerospace.

The position offers a competitive benefits package and a collaborative work environment.

Qualifications

• 2+ years of experience in HPC software design and testing.
• Strong hands-on experience in production or research environments.
• Solid understanding of data structures and algorithms.

Responsibilities

• Design and optimize parallel programming methods within Ansys Mechanical products.
• Profile solver performance across CPU and GPU architectures.
• Maintain code benchmarking suites to catch regressions.

Skills

HPC software design

MPI

C/C++

Fortran

GPU programming (CUDA, OpenMP)

Education

Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering, Computational Science, Applied Mathematics, Physics, or related field

Master's degree or PhD preferred

Tools

Git

Intel VTune

NVIDIA Nsight

CMake

Job description

We Are

Synopsys is the leader in engineering solutions from silicon to systems, enabling customers to rapidly innovate AI-powered products. We deliver industry-leading silicon design, IP, simulation and analysis solutions, and design services. We partner closely with our customers across a wide range of industries to maximize their R&D capability and productivity, powering innovation today that ignites the ingenuity of tomorrow.

You Are

You have spent your career making code run faster on hardware that keeps changing. You understand that the difference between a solver that takes three hours and one that takes twenty minutes is not just compute power, it is how the algorithm maps to memory, how threads communicate, and whether someone thought hard about cache locality six months ago. You know your way around a profiler and you can read the output without needing to Google every metric.

Working across CPU and GPU architectures does not intimidate you. You have debugged MPI communication bottlenecks, wrestled with build systems that span multiple platforms, and written code that has to perform consistently whether it is running on a local workstation or a cloud-based HPC cluster. You think in terms of scalability, not just correctness.

Collaboration comes naturally. You can sit with a domain expert who speaks in finite elements and boundary conditions, extract what matters for the code, and turn that into a design spec that your team can actually build from. You care about the engineers downstream who depend on your work holding up under real‑world load, not just passing CI.

At Synopsys, you will work on simulation software that shapes how products get designed across industries. The problems are real, the scale is significant, and what you optimize will matter.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Design, implement, and optimize parallel programming methods within Ansys Mechanical solver products using MPI, GPU programming models like CUDA, HIP, SYCL, OpenMP, and other HPC frameworks
• Profile solver performance across CPU and GPU architectures using tools like Intel VTune, NVIDIA Nsight, or similar, and translate findings into actionable performance improvements
• Build and maintain code benchmarking suites that track solver performance across releases and catch regressions before they ship
• Drive adoption of modular, hardware‑agnostic HPC programming models across multiple solver codebases, working with development teams to ensure consistency and reusability
• Collaborate with numerical methods experts to translate complex algorithmic requirements into performant, maintainable software designs
• Support procurement, configuration, and management of HPC development and testing platforms, including on‑premise clusters and cloud‑based environments
• Own packaging, build system work, and DevOps tooling using CMake, Azure DevOps, Conan, Docker, or CI/CD pipelines to streamline deployment and testing workflows

The Impact You Will Have

• Reduce solve times for engineering simulations used by leading companies across automotive, aerospace, energy, and electronics industries
• Enable customers to run larger, more complex models by making solvers scale efficiently across hundreds or thousands of cores
• Accelerate the adoption of GPU computing in production simulation workflows, unlocking new performance tiers for users with modern hardware
• Improve developer productivity across multiple solver teams by building reusable HPC frameworks and shared tooling
• Ensure performance consistency and reliability across solver releases through rigorous benchmarking and regression testing
• Help shape the technical direction of Synopsys simulation products as HPC architectures and customer workloads continue to evolve
• Support faster iteration cycles for product development teams by streamlining build, test, and deployment infrastructure

What You’ll Need

• Minimum Requirements: Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering, Computational Science, Applied Mathematics, Physics, or related field with 2+ years of experience, or Master’s degree in a related field. PhD preferred.
• Strong hands‑on experience with HPC software design, testing, and deployment in production or research environments
• Solid understanding of data structures, algorithms, and performance considerations in parallel computing contexts
• Proficiency with Git and collaborative development workflows across distributed teams
• Proficiency in Fortran and C/C++ for performance‑critical code development

• Experience with MPI and distributed memory programming models
• Experience with GPU hardware and at least one GPU programming model such as CUDA, HIP, SYCL/oneAPI, OpenMP, OpenACC, or Kokkos is a strong plus

Who You Are

• You can look at a profiler trace and identify the bottleneck without needing three meetings to discuss it
• You write code that other engineers can pick up six months later without needing you to explain every design choice
• You ask clarifying questions when a requirement is vague rather than guessing and building the wrong thing
• You are comfortable managing your own time across multiple priorities and know when to elevate blockers versus solve them yourself
• You can explain a technical tradeoff between two HPC approaches to a domain expert in terms they care about, not just what the benchmark says
• You stay current with HPC architecture trends and programming models without needing to be told, because you care about building software that will still perform well two hardware generations from now

The Team You’ll Be Part Of

You will work within the Ansys Mechanical R&D organization, collaborating with numerical methods experts, solver developers, and other HPC engineers across a geographically distributed team. Your work will directly support the performance and scalability of industry‑leading simulation products used by engineers worldwide to design and validate critical systems.

Rewards and Benefits

We offer a comprehensive range of health, wellness, and financial benefits to cater to your needs. Our total rewards include both monetary and non‑monetary offerings. Your recruiter will provide more details about the salary range and benefits during the hiring process.

Equal Opportunity

At Synopsys, we want talented people of every background to feel valued and supported to do their best work. Synopsys considers all applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, military veteran status, or disability.

Compensation

In addition to the base salary, this role may be eligible for an annual bonus, equity, and other discretionary bonuses. Synopsys offers comprehensive health, wellness, and financial benefits as part of a competitive total rewards package. The actual compensation offered will be based on a number of job‑related factors, including location, skills, experience, and education. Your recruiter can share more specific details on the total rewards package upon request. The base salary range for this role is across the U.S.