Senior Principal Software Engineer

Job Title

Senior Principal Software Engineer

Role Summary

Join the System Verification Group to design, implement, and deploy production-grade AI agents and supporting infrastructure integrated with Cadence EDA tools. The role focuses on building scalable, reliable agentic systems, evaluation frameworks, and data/retrieval pipelines that improve engineering productivity across the semiconductor design lifecycle.

Experience Level

Senior — this principal-level role requires substantial industry experience; the posting specifies 15+ years of relevant software development experience.

Responsibilities

Key responsibilities include designing and delivering reliable agentic systems and associated tooling for production use.

• Design and implement scalable infrastructure for AI agents within the ChipStack SuperAgent ecosystem.
• Build evaluation frameworks to measure agent performance, reliability, and alignment with engineering workflows.
• Develop data pipelines, retrieval systems, and context-engineering strategies to support grounded agent behavior.
• Contribute to CI, automated testing, and observability to ensure production-quality deployments.
• Optimize system performance across latency, cost, reliability, and scalability dimensions.

Requirements

Required technical skills and experience for successful execution of the role.

• Must-have: Strong software engineering fundamentals: system design, refactoring, debugging, testing, and delivering production-quality distributed systems.
• Must-have: Practical understanding of large language models and considerations for deploying them in production (latency, cost, reliability, monitoring).
• Must-have: Experience designing evaluation frameworks for AI systems, including benchmarking, regression testing, and failure analysis.
• Must-have: Experience with CI/CD, automated testing, logging, tracing, and observability for ML/AI applications.
• Nice-to-have: Agent architecture experience (reason–act loops, planning, tool calling, persistent memory, structured outputs).
• Nice-to-have: LLM engineering skills: prompt engineering, context management, alignment techniques, familiarity with frontier models.
• Nice-to-have: Retrieval and data systems experience: RAG pipelines, embeddings, indexing strategies, chunking, grounding techniques.
• Nice-to-have: Experience leveraging AI-assisted development workflows to improve engineering productivity and code quality.
• Domain interest: Interest or familiarity with semiconductor design, EDA workflows, and high-performance computing environments.

Education Requirements

Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field. The posting specifies 15+ years of relevant software development experience.

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.