Principal AI Forward Deployment Engineer

Job Title

Principal AI Forward Deployment Engineer

Role Summary

Embed with strategic semiconductor customers to deploy and operationalize Cadence AI and agentic solutions across end-to-end silicon design flows. Act as the senior technical lead at the customer to turn AI-enabled workflows into measurable productivity and tape-out improvements.

This is a customer-facing, applied-AI role focused on integrating LLMs and Cadence AI tooling into RTL, verification, implementation, and signoff methodologies.

Experience Level

Senior — targeted at experienced practitioners. The role expects roughly 10+ years of hands-on semiconductor or chip-design experience.

Responsibilities

Deliver, integrate, and scale AI-enabled solutions inside customer design and methodology environments.

• Lead end-to-end deployment of LLM- and agent-powered solutions across RTL, verification, synthesis, place-and-route, timing/power signoff, and packaging flows.
• Architect and tune agentic workflows, prompt strategies, RAG pipelines, and tool-calling patterns to automate EDA tasks (debug triage, ECO loops, constraint authoring, PD recipe tuning, logs summarization, copilots).
• Map customer methodology onto Cadence AI building blocks and create reference flows the customer CAD/methodology team can operate long-term.
• Define, measure, and report KPIs (cycle time reduction, engineer-hours saved, first-pass success, license/compute efficiency) and own pilot-to-production rollouts.
• Serve as trusted technical advisor to customer fellows, methodology leads, and design principals; run design reviews and joint roadmaps.
• Advise customer IT/InfoSec on secure LLM access, deployment patterns, model routing, logging, and inference capacity planning when required.
• Capture playbooks, reference designs, and reusable prompts; mentor field AEs, FAEs, and customer champions.

Requirements

Must-have skills and qualifications for success in this role.

• 10+ years of hands-on semiconductor or chip-design experience in one or more areas: front-end design (RTL, microarchitecture, DV), physical design/implementation (synthesis, P&R, timing, power, signoff), CAD/methodology/flow development, or production tape-out leadership.
• Practitioner-level fluency with industry EDA flows and demonstrated history of shipping silicon and improving cycle time.
• Proven ability to apply LLMs/AI tools to real engineering work (agent-based debug, code/RTL assist, scripted automation, copilots, RAG over design docs/logs).
• Excellent customer-facing communication and credibility with engineers, methodology leads, and CAD/design-enablement leaders.
• Bias to action, ownership, and comfort serving as the primary technical lead for customer AI deployments.
• Based in or willing to relocate to Portland, OR; able to be on-site at customer locations as engagements require.

Nice-to-have / bonus qualifications:

• Prior experience as a Cadence, Synopsys, or Siemens EDA power user, AE, or methodology architect.
• Hands-on experience with agentic frameworks (Claude Code, Cursor, LangGraph, AutoGen, or custom tool-calling stacks) applied to engineering workflows.
• Experience deploying secure enterprise LLM access (gateways, model routing, key management, audit logging) and with GPU/inference infrastructure (vLLM/TGI/Triton, fine-tuning/LoRA/SLM).
• Background in low-power/high-performance AI/ML, networking, automotive, or HPC silicon programs; public artifacts (papers, talks, OSS) are a plus.

Education Requirements

BS, MS, or PhD in Electrical Engineering (EE), Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE), Computer Science (CS), or a related technical discipline as stated in the posting.

About the Company

Company: Cadence Design Systems

Headquarters: San Jose, California, USA

Cadence Design Systems is a global electronic design automation company that provides software, hardware, and intellectual property for designing advanced semiconductor chips. With over 25 years in the industry, Cadence is known for its innovative technology solutions and has been recognized by Fortune Magazine as one of the 100 Best Companies to Work For. The company is dedicated to solving complex technical challenges in order to enable customers to create revolutionary products and experiences.