Applications Engineering, Director

Job Description and Requirements

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 years in the trenches of digital design, working synthesis flows, closing timing on advanced nodes, and debugging why a place-and-route run just blew past its power budget at 3am. More than that, you have learned how to take that hard-won knowledge and turn it into something a customer team can actually use. You do not just solve problems, you teach people how to solve them, and you know the difference between a one-time fix and a methodology that scales across an entire design organization.

Leading a team comes naturally to you because you have been the engineer who needed clear direction, the one who hit a wall and needed air cover, and the one who wanted to grow but did not know how. You set priorities without overthinking them. You protect your team's time while keeping customers moving. You escalate when it matters and resolve when you can.

You are comfortable sitting across from a customer architect who is frustrated that their block will not converge and walking out with a plan that involves three engineers, two R&D escalations, and a revised timeline everyone believes in. At Synopsys, you will lead a team that does this work every day, for customers building the chips that matter.

What You'll Be Doing

• Lead customer engagements to deploy digital design methodologies including synthesis, place-and-route, timing closure, and power optimization for advanced node designs
• Solve complex technical challenges alongside customer engineering teams, diagnosing bottlenecks in their flows and tuning tool configurations to hit PPA targets
• Deliver technical training and hands-on guidance to customer teams on tool usage, methodology best practices, and advanced implementation techniques
• Manage and mentor a team of applications engineers, balancing project delivery, technical growth, and customer relationship ownership across multiple engagements
• Own customer escalations, driving debug and resolution plans in partnership with R&D, Product, and Program teams when issues block tapeout or deployment
• Serve as the voice of the customer to Synopsys R&D teams, translating field issues and feature requests into actionable product feedback that shapes tool development
• Drive AI initiatives and work with cross-functional and global AE teams to scale adoption of new capabilities within customer organizations and internal workflows

The Impact You Will Have

• Your team will enable customers to tape out advanced node designs on time by solving the hard methodology and tooling problems that would otherwise derail schedules
• Customer engineering teams will adopt Synopsys flows more broadly and deeply because you made the tools understandable and the methodology repeatable
• R&D priorities will shift based on the field intelligence you surface, turning customer pain points into product improvements that benefit the entire user base
• Your engineers will grow into stronger technical leaders and customer partners because you gave them the coaching, context, and autonomy they needed
• Escalations will resolve faster and with better outcomes because you built the cross-functional relationships and processes that turn chaos into coordinated action
• AI-driven capabilities will move from pilot to production in customer environments because you led the enablement and proved the value
• Synopsys will retain and expand relationships with strategic accounts because your team consistently delivers technical wins that matter to their business

What You'll Need

• 16+ years of hands-on experience in digital design implementation, including synthesis, place-and-route, timing closure, and power optimization on advanced process nodes
• Deep working knowledge of Synopsys digital design tools or equivalent EDA platforms, with the ability to debug flows, tune configurations, and teach methodologies
• Proven experience leading technical teams, including hiring, mentoring, performance management, and resource allocation across multiple customer engagements
• Track record of managing customer escalations and driving resolution through cross-functional collaboration with R&D, Product, and Support organizations
• Strong technical judgment to prioritize competing demands, allocate resources effectively, and make tradeoff decisions under pressure
• Willingness to travel occasionally to support strategic customer engagements, executive reviews, and critical project milestones
• Experience with AI/ML tooling or methodologies in the context of EDA workflows is a plus

Who You Are

• You can walk into a tense customer meeting where a design is stuck and leave with a clear action plan that everyone believes in, not because you overpromised but because you broke the problem down honestly
• You know when to let your team run with something and when to step in, and you do not confuse oversight with micromanagement
• You can explain a complex tool limitation to a customer VP in two sentences without losing the technical nuance or making excuses
• You track metrics that matter, like milestone health and issue resolution time, not because someone asked for a report but because you use them to make better decisions
• You push back on R&D when a workaround is not good enough and push back on customers when their expectations are not grounded in reality, and you do both without burning relationships
• You treat mentoring as part of the job, not an extra, and your team knows you care about their growth because you make time for it even when things are busy

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.