Cadence Design Systems

Senior Principal Applied ML Engineer

Cadence Design Systems$154K — $286K *
Information Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • BS with 10 years, MS with 7 years, or PhD with 5 years in related field.
  • Strong fundamentals in software engineering, particularly with distributed systems.
  • Experience in building production-quality AI systems.
  • Solid understanding of large language models (LLMs) and their deployment challenges.
  • Background in designing evaluation frameworks for AI, including benchmarking and failure analysis.

Responsibilities

  • Design and implement AI agent infrastructure within ChipStack SuperAgent ecosystem.
  • Build robust evaluation frameworks for assessing agent performance and reliability.
  • Develop data pipelines and context-engineering strategies for agent behavior.
  • Contribute to automated testing and observability systems for AI systems.
  • Optimize AI system performance across various dimensions like cost and reliability.

Benefits

  • Paid vacation and holidays
  • 401(k) plan with employer match
  • Employee stock purchase plan
  • Variety of medical, dental, and vision plan options
Full Job Description
About This Role

Cadence Design Systems is the leading provider of design automation tools for electronic and intelligent systems design. 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.

The role focuses on building reliable, scalable agentic systems that operate within complex engineering workflows. The ideal candidate combines strong software engineering fundamentals with practical experience in ML systems and agent infrastructure, enabling deployment of high-impact AI solutions in production environments.

In this role, you will be part of the ChipStack AI Super Agent team and will operate at the forefront of semiconductor design and AI innovation, utilizing advanced AI tools to architect, design, and validate the next generation of verification methodologies. You will collaborate closely with a highly skilled team of machine learning engineers experienced in training large language models at scale, as well as accomplished software engineers with proven expertise in product development and deployment. You will be working on the world's first agentic AI platform that autonomously designs and verifies chips with up to 10 productivity gains.

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.

Required Qualifications
  • 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.


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. Please note that the salary range is a guideline and compensation may vary based on factors such as qualifications, skill level, competencies and work location. Our benefits programs include: paid vacation and paid holidays, 401(k) plan with employer match, employee stock purchase plan, a variety of medical, dental and vision plan options, and more.

About Cadence Design Systems

Cadence Design Systems, Inc. is an American multinational electronic design automation software and engineering services company, founded in 1988 by the merger of SDA Systems and ECAD, Inc. The company produces software, hardware and silicon structures for designing integrated circuits, systems on chips (SoCs) and printed circuit boards.
Learn more about Cadence Design Systems
Size
9,300 employees
Market Cap
$43.9 billion
Industry
Net Income
$590.6 million
Founded
2018
5 Year Trend
+10.5%
Revenue
$2.6 billion
NASDAQ

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