Senior Principal Applied ML Engineer

About the role

The ML / Software Engineer – ChipStack SuperAgent Team will be responsible for designing, implementing, and evaluating AI agents that enhance productivity across the semiconductor design lifecycle. This engineer will contribute to the development of robust agent infrastructure, evaluation systems, and production-grade AI capabilities integrated within Cadence’s electronic design automation (EDA) ecosystem.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement scalable infrastructure for AI agents operating within Cadence’s ChipStack SuperAgent ecosystem.
• Build robust evaluation frameworks to measure agent performance, reliability, and alignment with engineering workflows.
• Develop data pipelines, retrieval systems, and context-engineering strategies to support consistent and grounded agent behavior.
• Contribute to continuous integration, automated testing, and observability systems to ensure production-quality deployment of AI-enabled systems.
• Optimize system performance across latency, cost, reliability, and scalability dimensions.

Requirements

• BS with a minimum of 10 years of experience OR MS with a minimum of 7 years of experience OR PhD with a minimum of 5 years of experience
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, including design, refactoring, debugging, and testing of complex distributed systems.
• Demonstrated experience building production-quality systems.
• Understanding of large language models (LLMs) and practical considerations for deploying them in real-world systems (latency, cost, reliability, monitoring).
• Experience designing evaluation frameworks for AI systems, including benchmarking, regression testing, and failure analysis.

Skills of Interest

• Agent architecture: Experience with reason–act loops, planning/evaluation/self-correction patterns, tool/function calling, persistent memory systems, and structured outputs.
• LLM engineering: Familiarity with frontier LLMs and trade-offs across model families; experience with prompt engineering, context management, and alignment techniques.
• Retrieval and data systems: Understanding of RAG pipelines, embeddings, indexing strategies, chunking methodologies, and grounding techniques.
• Infrastructure and observability: Experience building logging, tracing, monitoring, and evaluation systems for ML/AI applications.
• AI-assisted development workflows: Leveraging AI tools to enhance engineering productivity and code quality.
• Interest in semiconductor design, EDA workflows, and high-performance computing environments.

Benefits

• The annual salary range for California is $154,000 to $286,000.
• 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.

Culture

• Challenge the status quo: We are innovators who challenge industry norms and push forward our vision of how silicon should be built.
• Strong opinions, loosely held: We are low on ego, but high on collaboration. We are okay to be wrong and are always open to learning.
• Ship fast, ship quality: We ruthlessly prioritize what matters. We build at lightning speed, but never compromise on the high standards required by the semiconductor industry.
• Proud 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.