{"id":107490,"url":"https://alion.io/job/cadence-applied-ml-director-technical-team-lead","title":"Applied ML Director (Technical Team Lead)","company":{"id":4351,"name":"Cadence Design Systems","domain":"cadence.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/cadence","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workday","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":82,"open_postings":115,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.73,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":57,"computed_at":"2026-10-26T05:57:25Z"}},"role":"Leadership","role_family":"Leadership","seniority":"head","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Jose, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":178500,"max":331500,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":331500},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":7,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Embeddings","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Prompt Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Structured Outputs","optional":false},{"name":"Cadence Palladium","optional":true},{"name":"Cadence Protium","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-08-07T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-08-07","last_verified_at":"2026-10-25T13:14:13Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":80,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":80},"description":"At Cadence, we hire and develop leaders and innovators who want to make an impact on the world of technology.\nAbout Us\nChips are at the center of today's tech-driven world. But how we design and verify them has not fundamentally changed in decades, while their complexity and specialization have skyrocketed due to increasing performance demands from AI. We are a dynamic, fast-moving team of software developers, ML scientists, and research-minded engineers on a mission to change that.\nOperating with the agility of a startup but backed by industry-leading verification technologies, we are part of the System Verification Group (SVG). Our charter is to developstate-of-the-artEDA software and hardware platforms (includingXcelium, Jasper, Palladium, Protium, and Helium) and supercharge them withcutting-edgeAI, automation, and advanced data-driven workflows.\nAbout This Role\nCadence Design Systems is the leading provider of design automation tools for electronic and intelligent systems design. As theApplied ML Director for theChipStackSuperAgentTeam, you will lead a highly technical group of ML and software engineers responsible for designing, implementing, and evaluating AI agents that enhance productivity across the semiconductor design lifecycle.\nThis is a true \"player-coach\" role. You will act as the technical backbone of the team-deeply hands-on with architecture, system design, and coding-while concurrently managing, mentoring, and scaling the engineering team. You will drive the technical roadmap for our agent infrastructure, evaluation systems, and production-grade AI capabilities integrated within Cadence’s EDA ecosystem. The ideal candidate pairs seasoned engineering leadership with practical, in-the-weeds experience building scalable ML systems and agentic workflows.\nResponsibilities\nLead & Mentor: Manage and grow a high-performing team of ML and software engineers. Foster a culture of technical excellence, continuous learning, and rapid execution.\n\nHands-On Technical Leadership: Drive the technical vision and actively contribute to the codebase. Design, implement, and review scalable infrastructure for AI agents within theChipStackSuperAgentecosystem.\n\nArchitect Production AI: Guidethe development of robust evaluation frameworks, data pipelines, retrieval systems (RAG), and context-engineering strategies to ensure consistent, grounded, and aligned agent behavior.\n\nOperational Excellence: Oversee continuous integration, automated testing, and observability systems. Make high-level architectural decisions tooptimizesystem performance across latency, cost, reliability, and scalability.\n\nCross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with product management, research, and core engineering teams to align the AI roadmap with overarching EDA platform goals.\n\nRequired Qualifications\nEducation: MS or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, ora relatedtechnical field.\n\nLeadership Experience: 3+ years of direct engineering management or formal technical lead experience, with a proventrack recordof successfully mentoring engineers and delivering complex projects.\n\nEngineering Fundamentals: 7+ years of hands-on software engineering and ML experience. You mustpossessdeepexpertisein design, refactoring, debugging, and testing distributed systems-and you should still be comfortable writing production-quality code today.\n\nLLM Expertise: Deep understanding of large language models (LLMs) and the practical realities of deploying them in production (latency, cost, reliability, monitoring, and failure analysis).\n\nSystem Evaluation: Experience designing rigorous evaluation frameworks for AI systems, including benchmarking and regression testing.\n\nSkills of Interest\nAgent Architecture: Hands-on experience with reason-act loops, planning/self-correction patterns, tool/function calling, persistent memory systems, and structured outputs.\n\nLLM Engineering: Familiarity with frontier LLMs and trade-offs across model families; practical experience with prompt engineering, context management, and model alignment techniques.\n\nRetrieval & Data Systems: Deep understanding of RAG pipelines, embeddings, indexing strategies, chunking methodologies, and grounding techniques.\n\nInfrastructure & Observability: Experience building logging, tracing, monitoring, and evaluation systems specifically tailored for ML/AI applications.\n\nDomain Interest: A strong interest in semiconductor design, EDA workflows, and high-performance computing environments (prior EDA experience is aplus, butnotrequired).\n\nOur Culture\nChallenge the status quo: We are innovators who challenge industry norms and push forward our vision of how silicon should be built.\n\nStrong opinions,loosely held: We are low on ego, but high on collaboration. We are okay to be wrong and are always open to learning.\n\nShip fast, ship quality: We ruthlessly prioritize what matters. We build at lightningspeed, butnever compromise on thehigh standardsrequired by the semiconductor industry.\n\nProud of our craft: Attention to detail is in our DNA. We take pride in what we build and go the extra mile to ensure an exceptional experience for our users.\n\nThe annual salary range for California is $178,500 to $331,500. You may also be eligible to receive incentive compensation: bonus, equity, and benefits. Sales positions generally offer a competitive On Target Earnings (OTE) incentive compensation structure. Please note that the salary range is a guideline and compensation may vary based on factors such as qualifications, skill level, competencies and work location. Our benefits programs include: paid vacation and paid holidays, 401(k) plan with employer match, employee stock purchase plan, a variety of medical, dental and vision plan options, and more.\nWe’re doing work that matters. Help us solve what others can’t.","description_format":"text","description_chars":5827,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":7,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"master","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Continuous learning","Equity"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["EDA Software","Semiconductor IP & Chip Design Services"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-08-07T00:00:00Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 368 · green card filings: 176","filings_12m":368,"filings_prev_12m":268,"green_card_filings_12m":176,"median_offered_wage_usd":150882,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-15T11:24:14+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)","US Department of Labor: PERM disclosure data (green cards)"],"filings_for_role_12m":4}],"liveness":{"score":26,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":1,"p_active":0.588,"p_room":0.44,"age_days":80,"expected_fill_days":57,"reasons":["conf:16","stale_co","velocity","win:tail","crowd:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-26T05:57:25Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":331500,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/cadence-applied-ml-director-technical-team-lead","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/cadence-applied-ml-director-technical-team-lead.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-26T09:34:14Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":12977,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-27T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":4351},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=4351"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fcadence-applied-ml-director-technical-team-lead"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fcadence-applied-ml-director-technical-team-lead"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fcadence-applied-ml-director-technical-team-lead"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/cadence-applied-ml-director-technical-team-lead\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fcadence-applied-ml-director-technical-team-lead"}]}