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Synopsys

AI Sr Staff Engineer

Synopsys Sunnyvale, California, United States Full-time 2 days ago
Physical Design & EDA

Originally posted 10 November 2026 by the employer.

About the role

You will work on AI systems that power semiconductor design workflows, leading the adaptation of foundation models to specialized engineering domains like hardware description languages, RTL design, and EDA workflows.

What you'll do

  • Lead the adaptation of foundation models to hardware description languages, RTL design, and EDA workflows using supervised fine-tuning, LoRA/PEFT, and synthetic data pipelines.
  • Research and implement post-training methods including preference optimization, iterative alignment, and reasoning enhancement using Monte Carlo Tree Search, process reward models, and trajectory-based supervision.
  • Architect agentic systems capable of multi-step planning, tool calling, self-correction, and analytics over structured data sources like CSV, JSON, Parquet, and SQL, with sandboxed execution.
  • Own the evaluation strategy for LLM and agent systems by building automated frameworks with LLM-as-judge pipelines, domain-specific benchmarks, pass@k metrics, and regression suites.
  • Develop production ML monitoring to detect feature drift, data drift, and performance degradation using statistical tests like Kolmogorov-Smirnov, Wasserstein distance, and Jensen-Shannon divergence.
  • Build scalable pipelines for dataset construction, distributed multi-GPU training on NVIDIA A100/H100 clusters, checkpoint evaluation, and experiment tracking using PyTorch, Hugging Face, DeepSpeed, and FSDP.

What you'll need

  • PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent practical experience in applied AI research and production ML systems.
  • 8+ years of hands-on experience building and shipping machine learning systems, with at least 3 years focused on LLMs, post-training, or agentic AI.
  • Strong foundation in supervised fine-tuning, parameter-efficient methods, preference optimization, and reasoning-enhancement techniques including search-based inference and reward modeling.
  • Proven ability to design and implement rigorous evaluation frameworks, including automated benchmarks, LLM-as-judge pipelines, and statistical validation of model improvements.
  • Experience building production ML monitoring, drift detection, and retraining pipelines using statistical methods and data-quality tools.
  • Track record of translating research into production systems, with evidence through publications, patents, or shipped products.

Skills: LLM, PyTorch, RTL design, supervised fine-tuning, EDA workflows

More semiconductor jobs: Synopsys jobs · EDA tools engineer jobs · Sunnyvale jobs

Market context

First seen in our index 0 days ago, well below the 21-day median for EDA/CAD Engineering roles.

EDA/CAD Engineering · AI EDA Design

Open roles in category
105
Median days since first seen
21 d
Category median salary (all employers)
$214k
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
How Synopsys compares in EDA/CAD Engineering hiring
Metric Synopsys All employers we track in this specialty (105 roles · 29 employers)
Open roles in this specialty 11 105
Open roles in the wider Physical Implementation family 118 1638 · 118 employers
Median days since first seen 6 d 21 d (+15 d vs this employer)
Median salary (USD postings) n/a $214k

Skills observed across this category: LLM, PyTorch, RTL design, supervised fine-tuning, EDA workflows

Who's hiring in this category

  • Keysight Technologies · 13 open roles · median 20 d
  • NVIDIA · 13 open roles · median 43 d
  • NXP Semiconductors · 10 open roles · median 101 d
  • STMicroelectronics · 7 open roles · median 7 d
  • Synopsys (this employer) · 7 open roles · median 21 d
  • Cadence Design Systems · 6 open roles · median 77 d

How we counted: 105 open EDA/CAD Engineering (AI EDA Design) roles from 29 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 12 Nov 2026. Specialty figures count only roles carrying this exact specialty label, so an employer's related work in neighbouring specialties is not included there, and is counted in the wider Physical Implementation family row. Days are counted from when our index first saw each posting, not from the employer's original posting date.

Synopsys

Synopsys

Apply now
Sunnyvale, California, United States
On-site
Full-time
2 days ago

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