Principal Site Reliability Engineer, Unix Systems

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 keeping production Unix/Linux infrastructure running when it matters most, and you know the difference between a system that looks healthy in a dashboard and one that actually performs under load when thousands of engineers are trying to compile code at 9am across three continents. You think in layers. When a job scheduler starts behaving strangely, you do not just restart it. You trace through logs, check kernel parameters, look at network saturation, talk to the team that changed their workload pattern last week, and find the actual cause.

You are comfortable being the person who gets pulled into the hardest problems, the ones where five other people have already looked and walked away confused. You ask better questions. You build mental models of how distributed systems actually behave, not how the documentation says they should. You have probably administered LSF, Slurm, or Grid Engine in a production environment where downtime meant engineers sitting idle, and you have learned to think three steps ahead.

At Synopsys, you will support infrastructure that directly affects how 30,000 people build the chips that power everything. The scale is real, the problems are hard, and the team needs someone who has already done this work.

What You'll Be Doing

• Administer and troubleshoot large scale Unix/Linux environments supporting business critical engineering workloads across global development teams
• Support grid and HPC infrastructure running workload schedulers like IBM Spectrum LSF, Slurm, PBS Pro, or Grid Engine for compute intensive engineering jobs
• Diagnose and resolve complex production issues affecting job execution, scheduling, resource utilization, system performance, and infrastructure availability
• Maintain and improve reliability of source code and development platforms including GitHub, GitLab, Perforce, and Artifactory used by software engineering teams globally
• Build automation, scripts, tools, and operational documentation that reduce repetitive work and improve system reliability and scalability
• Participate in production support and on call rotation covering globally distributed systems, including occasional evening, weekend, or early morning coverage
• Conduct root cause analysis after significant incidents and drive corrective and preventative actions that prevent recurrence

The Impact You Will Have

• Keep critical engineering infrastructure available and performant for thousands of engineers building semiconductor products across the US, Europe, India, and other global locations
• Reduce engineering downtime by catching and resolving infrastructure problems before they affect productivity or workload execution
• Improve the stability and performance of HPC and grid environments so engineering teams can run compute intensive workloads reliably at scale
• Make development workflows faster and more reliable by maintaining high availability source code and build infrastructure that engineering teams depend on daily
• Eliminate recurring operational problems by building sustainable automation and process improvements rather than relying on reactive firefighting
• Accelerate incident resolution by providing deep technical expertise during complex troubleshooting that spans multiple infrastructure components
• Enable better capacity planning and infrastructure decisions by monitoring system health, performance trends, and resource utilization patterns

What You'll Need

• 7+ years of hands on experience administering and troubleshooting Unix/Linux systems in complex production environments, with depth of technical capability being more important than years alone
• Strong knowledge of Unix/Linux operating systems, system administration, performance troubleshooting, and production support for business critical infrastructure
• Experience supporting large scale infrastructure or server environments used by engineering or software development organizations where reliability and performance directly affect productivity
• Demonstrated ability to independently diagnose and resolve complex infrastructure problems affecting production systems and technical users
• Strong scripting and automation capability using shell, Python, Perl, or similar languages for systems administration, troubleshooting, and operational improvement
• Experience with HPC, grid computing, cluster computing, or large scale engineering compute environments is a strong plus
• Hands on experience with IBM Spectrum LSF, Platform LSF, Slurm, PBS Pro, Grid Engine, or comparable workload management technologies is highly valuable

Who You Are

• You can walk into a situation where a grid scheduler is behaving unpredictably, ask the right diagnostic questions, trace through system logs and job traces, and identify whether the problem is configuration drift, a kernel bug, network saturation, or a workload pattern that nobody anticipated
• You take ownership of hard problems and drive them through resolution even when the path is not obvious, pulling in the right people and keeping stakeholders informed without needing someone to manage your progress
• You write clear incident summaries and postmortems that help the team learn what actually happened and prevent the same failure from happening again, not just check a box
• You can explain a complex infrastructure tradeoff to a software engineer in two sentences without losing the nuance, and you know when to dig deeper versus when to escalate
• You are comfortable working across time zones with globally distributed teams, providing clear communication during incidents and complex troubleshooting activities that span multiple regions
• You recognize when a recurring operational problem needs a sustainable solution rather than another manual workaround, and you follow through on building that solution

The Team You'll Be Part Of

You will join the team responsible for critical engineering infrastructure used by software engineering teams globally. The team supports infrastructure for a large global engineering community, including grid and high performance computing environments, workload scheduling platforms, and source code and development systems. You will collaborate with engineering and infrastructure teams across the US, Europe, India, and other global locations. This is a hybrid role based in the Bay Area with flexibility to work from our Sunnyvale office and remotely.

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.

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.