Senior Director, Silicon Architecture and Design Engineering (PCIe)

Altera Corporation; San Jose, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 232,000 - 341,000; Full time

Job summary

Altera Corporation in California seeks a Senior Director, Silicon Architecture and Design Engineering (PCIe) to lead the PCIe Center of Excellence and own the PCIe technology franchise across FPGA, ASIC, and SoC programs.

You will drive architecture, verification, and production ramp, lead a large silicon organization, and partner with hardware, software, and IP teams to deliver high-speed interconnect solutions for AI, cloud, and data-center applications.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in EE/CE/CS and 15+ years silicon experience.
• Deep PCIe and high-speed I/O expertise across multi-generation silicon programs.
• Proven ability to lead large silicon teams and complex cross-functional programs.

Responsibilities

• Lead, grow, and mentor a silicon engineering organization across design, SoC integration, and program execution.
• Own delivery of FPGA, ASIC, and SoC products through full silicon lifecycle.
• Drive scalable design methodologies and KPI-based execution frameworks.

Skills

PCIe architecture

High-speed I/O

SoC integration

Leadership

FPGA/ASIC designs

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or Computer Science

Job description

**About the Role**Altera is seeking a **Senior Director, Silicon Architecture and Design Engineering (PCIe) to lead our PCIe Center of Excellence** and own the PCIe technology franchise across our programmable device portfolio, from multi-generation architecture and roadmap through hard and soft IP delivery, compliance, and customer enablement. The role is both the senior people leader for PCIe silicon engineering and Altera’s recognized technical authority on high-speed interconnect, setting technical direction, architecture, methodology, and roadmap for PCIe and adjacent coherent interconnect technologies. The successful candidate brings deep experience leading large-scale silicon organizations and complex cross-functional silicon programs, together with multi-generation PCIe and high-speed I/O expertise supporting AI, cloud, networking, and edge applications.**Responsibilities:** **Organizational Leadership*** Lead, grow, and mentor a high-performing silicon engineering organization spanning design, SoC integration, and program execution, including hiring and developing engineering managers and senior technical leads.* Own delivery of complex FPGA, ASIC, and SoC products across the full silicon lifecycle: product definition, architecture, microarchitecture, RTL design, verification, DFT, emulation, implementation, bring-up, validation, and production ramp.* Drive scalable design methodologies, KPI-based execution frameworks, and automation that improve quality, predictability, and velocity, and shape long-range investment in the capabilities needed to scale Altera’s silicon roadmap. **Technical Leadership: PCIe Center of Excellence*** Own PCIe technical direction end to end, covering protocol and controller architecture, PHY/SerDes integration, DMA, and virtualization across the PCIe stack.* Set architecture and integration strategy for PCIe and adjacent coherent interconnect such as CXL, aligned to emerging data-center and AI system architectures.* Lead PCIe subsystem decisions in high-performance SoCs, including IP reuse, controller/PHY integration, hard versus soft IP partitioning, and bandwidth, latency, reliability, and PPA tradeoffs. Direct hardware, firmware, and software co-design for feature enablement, error recovery, virtualization, and security.* Establish PCIe verification, validation, compliance, and interoperability strategy from pre-silicon verification and emulation through post-silicon bring-up and industry compliance.* Own the customer-facing PCIe deliverable end to end: hard IP and soft controller offerings, IP catalog and design-tool integration, reference designs, documentation, and design-in support. **Execution and Partnership*** Drive execution of large, complex silicon programs, covering planning, prioritization, resource alignment, milestone tracking, and risk management against aggressive performance, quality, cost, and schedule targets, partnering across architecture, software, systems, product planning, physical design, product engineering, and manufacturing through bring-up and production ramp.* Represent silicon engineering in executive reviews, roadmap planning, and cross-functional leadership forums, communicating program status, key technical decisions, risks, mitigations, and resource needs.* Engage customers, ecosystem and IP/EDA/foundry partners, and standards organizations such as PCI-SIG and the CXL Consortium to shape Altera’s long-term interconnect roadmap. **Salary Range**The pay range below is for Bay Area California only. Actual salary may vary based on a number of factors including job location, job-related knowledge, skills, experiences, trainings, etc. We also offer incentive opportunities that reward employees based on individual and company performance.**$****231,500 - $341,075****USD**We use artificial intelligence to screen, assess, or select applicants for the position. Applicants must be eligible for any required U.S. export authorizations. #LI-MD1### ## **Qualifications:****Minimum Qualifications*** Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field and 15+ years in silicon engineering, ASIC/SoC development, or FPGA product development.* 10+ years of experience in PCIe and high-speed I/O technologies, including architecture, silicon development, or product development for compute, acceleration, storage, networking, or data-center infrastructure applications.* Deep expertise in PCIe architecture and protocol across the Transaction, Data Link, and Physical layers: link initialization and training, ordering, flow control, enumeration, power management, error handling, and PHY/SerDes integration.* Demonstrated experience architecting and integrating PCIe controller and PHY subsystems into complex SoCs, including endpoint and/or root-port architectures and host/device system integration.* Experience delivering PCIe Gen4 and/or Gen5 designs into production silicon, with working knowledge of the architectural changes introduced in subsequent generations.* Experience leading engineering managers and senior technical leads, and delivering PCIe features across the full silicon lifecycle through production ramp. **Preferred Qualifications*** Master’s degree or PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or Computer Science; experience leading silicon development at advanced process nodes; and a track record of building and scaling silicon teams.* PCIe Gen6/Gen7 architectures: 64 and 128 GT/s signaling, PAM4, FLIT mode, forward error correction, L0p power management, advanced PHY/SerDes, link equalization and training, lane margining, bifurcation, and channel/package/board signal integrity including retimers.* Advanced PCIe capabilities such as SR-IOV, ATS, PASID, PRI, IOMMU integration, peer-to-peer, advanced error handling/RAS, and PCIe security.* CXL architecture and technologies, including CXL.io and, where applicable, CXL.cache, CXL.mem, coherency, memory expansion/pooling, or accelerator connectivity.* PCI-SIG compliance and interoperability: compliance workshops, Integrators List qualification, protocol and trace analysis, and interoperability across CPU, GPU, accelerator, NIC, SSD, switch, and retimer ecosystems.* FPGA architectures, programmable logic devices, or heterogeneous SoC platforms, including IP reuse across device families.* PCIe performance modeling, traffic analysis, QoS, and workload characterization for AI, HPC, cloud, storage, or accelerator platforms.* Adjacent interconnects such as UCIe or Ethernet; silicon security such as secure boot and hardware root of trust.