Applications Engineering, Staff Engineer - 19164

Job Description and Requirements

Alternate Job Titles

• FPGA Prototyping Applications Engineer
• Senior Staff Application Engineer, Verification
• HAPS Prototyping Solutions Engineer
• Senior Technical Applications Engineer, FPGA-Based Prototyping
• Field Applications Engineer, FPGA Prototyping

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 are at your best when the work is real-when the design is enormous, the schedule is unforgiving, and “good enough” isn’t good enough because someone needs the prototype to boot, run, and reveal the truth. You thrive in the messy middle between theory and reality, where success comes from making smart tradeoffs, staying relentlessly organized, and refusing to let details slip through the cracks. You don’t romanticize late nights or fire drills, but you stay steady under pressure and bring a calm, practical energy that helps everyone else keep moving.

You approach prototyping like a product, not a one-time stunt. You think constantly about who will use it next-software teams, validation engineers, architects-and you shape decisions around usability, repeatability, and speed of iteration. You’re the person who turns vague goals into crisp plans, sets expectations early, and communicates progress in a way that builds confidence rather than surprise. When something fails, you get curious, not defensive. You narrow the problem, test assumptions, and keep digging until the root cause is understood and the fix is durable.

You’re also deeply collaborative. You listen hard, read the room, and adapt your style to the audience-whether you’re guiding a customer through a tough constraint conversation or aligning internal teams around a path forward. You take ownership naturally, you follow through, and you leave people feeling supported, informed, and ready for the next milestone.

What You'll Be Doing

• Provide pre-sale and post-sale technical support for Synopsys HAPS-based prototyping solutions, including HAPS hardware and ProtoCompiler software
• Work directly with customers to prototype multi-million gate ASIC designs, guiding them through design partitioning, FPGA synthesis, system planning, and RTL debug
• Lead technical evaluations of HAPS products at customer sites, diagnosing complex design issues, resolving timing closure problems, and optimizing prototyping flows
• Develop and deliver customer training materials, application notes, and technical articles based on real deployment experience and customer use cases
• Collaborate with R&D teams to escalate product quality issues, propose new features, and contribute to improving quality of results in HAPS tools and flows
• Travel to customer sites as needed to support product deployments, troubleshoot critical issues, and enable successful prototype bring-up
• Script automation solutions in TCL and Python to streamline customer workflows and improve prototype performance

The Impact You Will Have

• Enable customers to catch critical bugs in multi-million gate SoCs before tape-out, saving them months of schedule risk and the cost of silicon respins
• Accelerate time-to-market for products across smartphones, network devices, and medical instrumentation by delivering working FPGA prototypes that software teams can develop against
• Shape the roadmap of HAPS products by feeding real customer pain points and deployment challenges directly back to engineering teams
• Build reusable methodologies, flows, and training content that scale across Synopsys's global customer base and reduce time to first prototype
• Act as the technical expert for HAPS within Synopsys, influencing how sales teams position the product and how customers adopt it
• Help customers navigate the complexity of Xilinx Ultrascale and Versal architectures, turning prototyping from a bottleneck into a competitive advantage
• Establish long-term technical relationships with the engineering teams at the world's leading chip companies

What You'll Need

• Bachelor's degree with 10+ years of relevant experience, or Master's degree with 8+ years
• Hands-on experience with FPGA-based prototyping, including taking complex ASIC designs and successfully mapping them to FPGA hardware
• Deep knowledge of digital design fundamentals, VHDL, Verilog, or SystemVerilog, and experience with synthesis and simulation flows
• Proven ability to debug FPGA designs and handle complex timing constraints, particularly on Xilinx Ultrascale or Versal device families
• Strong scripting skills in TCL and Python for automation and flow development
• Experience working directly with customers in a technical support, field applications, or consulting capacity is a strong plus
• Familiarity with Synopsys verification tools such as VCS, Verdi, or VC Formal is a plus

Who You Are

• You can walk into a customer meeting, quickly assess where their prototype effort is stuck, and propose a concrete path forward without needing perfect information
• You are comfortable explaining a complex partitioning tradeoff to a customer architect in a way that makes the technical and business implications clear
• You do not get rattled when a customer escalation lands on your desk at 4 p.m. on a Friday, you treat it as a puzzle to solve, not a crisis to panic over
• You write clear, useful documentation because you have been on the receiving end of bad app notes and refuse to inflict that on others
• You know when to push back on a customer request that will lead them down a dead end, and you do it in a way that builds trust instead of burning it
• You are organized enough to juggle multiple customer engagements, travel schedules, and internal projects without dropping threads

The Team You'll Be Part Of

You will join the HAPS Application Engineering team within Synopsys's Go-to-market organization. This team acts as the technical experts for HAPS FPGA-based prototyping products across Synopsys. You will work closely with sales teams during pre-sale evaluations, directly with customers during deployments and support engagements, and with R&D teams to influence product direction. The team supports customers globally, and you will collaborate with application engineers in other regions to share knowledge and solve complex prototyping challenges.

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.

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.