Semiconductor Leadership Hiring: 962 Director and VP Jobs

November 9, 2026

As of November 9, 2026, our job index tracked 962 active Director and VP job postings across 115 semiconductor employers: 928 Director postings and 34 Vice President postings.

This follows our October report on senior semiconductor postings that stay open, which looked at selected senior engineering and leadership positions. The current inventory is searchable on our Director and VP Jobs page.

Posting age is not time to fill

Among the 958 postings with a recorded first-seen event, the median age is 56 days and the average is 77 days. 339 postings, about 35% of that measured group, have remained active for at least 90 days. Another four postings lack a first-seen event and are excluded from these age calculations.

The average sits well above the median because older postings pull it upward. These figures describe the age of postings still active in the index, not how long completed hires took. They do not establish that leadership jobs fill faster or slower than the selected positions in October. A posting that remains online is not proof that an employer has failed to hire.

Employers with the most leadership postings

Qualcomm: 76
Applied Materials: 55
NVIDIA: 54
AMD: 46
Micron Technology: 37
GlobalFoundries: 29
ASM International: 25
SanDisk: 25

These counts describe active advertisements, not confirmed vacancies or the number of people each employer intends to hire.

Leadership hiring beyond the largest employers

Large semiconductor employers account for most of the postings, but leadership hiring is also active at emerging and specialized companies. Examples include technical leadership in ASIC design, verification, validation, analog and manufacturing. This group is not a verified under-500-employee cohort, and not every company below is an independent startup.

Graphcore: Director, Silicon Logical Design and Director, Post-Silicon Validation. Graphcore is a SoftBank-owned company, not an independent startup.
d-Matrix: Director, Quality and Reliability Engineering - AI Hardware in Santa Clara, alongside a VP, Investor Relations posting. Our earlier report on leadership hiring at d-Matrix, Tenstorrent and Renesas provides additional context.
Upscale AI: Senior Director, SerDes Digital Design in Santa Clara, with a listed annual range of $306,000 to $337,000.
Ambiq Micro: Director of Physical Design in Austin, alongside SoC architecture and silicon validation leadership.
Ayar Labs: Director, Analog/Mixed-Signal Design in San Jose, with a listed range of $240,000 to $300,000, and Director, ASIC Design Verification in Bengaluru.
SiMa.ai: Director, Embedded Software Engineering in San Jose, with a listed range of $231,100 to $358,200.
Positron AI: Director of ASIC Design and Director of Silicon Validation in Austin, each with a listed range of $200,000 to $350,000.

For candidates, the function matters as much as the level. A Director of Design Verification and a VP of Investor Relations address different needs. The title alone does not establish team size, reporting line or how much of the role involves direct technical work; those details need to come from the employer's description.

Leadership hiring in India

India accounts for 55 active Director and VP postings, compared with 626 assigned to the United States. Examples in Bengaluru and Hyderabad include:

Qualcomm: Director, Physical Design (Custom Silicon Group) and SoC Program Management Director in Bangalore.
Synopsys: Director - SoC Verification and Director of Digital Design Engineering, Memory Interface IP in Hyderabad.
Micron Technology: Director, CMBU Product Management in the United States, with a listed range of $170,000 to $353,000.
Arm: Director of Engineering (AI Inference Platform) and Director of Software Architecture in Bengaluru.

Other employers with leadership postings in India include Lumilens, Graphcore, Ayar Labs, Omni Design Technologies and Axelera AI.

Published pay: the sample matters

421 of the 962 postings include some form of published pay. For US postings with both range endpoints, our index contains 369 annual ranges treated as US-dollar pay. Of these, 155 explicitly store USD; 214 have no stored currency and are treated as USD because the posting is assigned to the United States. Only 142 of the 369 explicitly store an annual pay period; the remaining periods are inferred from the values. These assumptions should be considered when using the summary.

Across that 369-posting sample, the average listed minimum is $208,810 and the average listed maximum is $315,364. The median listed minimum is $200,000 and the median listed maximum is $300,000. These are separate summaries of advertised endpoints, not a single typical offer or a measure of total compensation.

As a currency-confirmed cross-check, the 155 ranges explicitly recorded as USD have average endpoints of $206,671 and $299,638, and median endpoints of $200,000 and $294,000. This subset still includes inferred annual periods. No currency conversion or hourly-to-annual conversion is used.

Three examples show why exact titles and locations are useful:

Qualcomm: VP, Software Product Management - Mobile Handset, San Diego, California: $272,100 to $408,100.
FormFactor: Vice President, Global Probes Field Applications - Remote, United States: $257,800 to $338,415.
STMicroelectronics: Segment Marketing & System Architecture CECP - Vice President, Santa Clara, California: $250,000 to $300,000.

Beyond the United States and India

Other countries with substantial leadership inventory include Taiwan (41 postings), Singapore (27) and the United Kingdom (25). Geography and function should both be checked: a country total does not mean all of its openings match a particular technical discipline.