AI Sr Staff Engineer

Summary: Leads the development of production AI systems that support semiconductor design workflows, covering model adaptation, post-training, agentic systems, evaluation, and ML monitoring.

Descriptions & Requirements

### Job Description and Requirements

### We Are
Synopsys is the leader in engineering solutions from silicon to systems, enabling customers to rapidly innovate AI-powered products. We deliver industry-leading silicon design, IP, simulation and analysis solutions, and design services. We partner closely with our customers across a wide range of industries to maximize their R&D capability and productivity, powering innovation today that ignites the ingenuity of tomorrow.

### You Are

You have spent years building AI systems that have to actually work in production, not just hit benchmarks in a paper. The difference between a model that ships and one that gets shelved is usually in the evaluation framework, the data pipeline, or the post-training strategy, and you are the kind of engineer who catches those gaps before they become blockers. You read the latest research not to chase trends but to extract what is actually useful, and you know when to build from scratch versus when to extend an open-source framework.

Domain-specific work excites you because it comes with ground truth. When you fine-tune a model to generate RTL code, you can compile it, simulate it, and know whether it works. That verifiability changes everything about how you train, evaluate, and iterate. You have built agent systems that do more than call APIs, they plan, execute, self-correct, and explain their reasoning. You have designed evaluation pipelines that gate releases and catch regressions before they reach users.

At Synopsys, you will work on AI systems that power semiconductor design workflows. The problems are hard, the data is structured and verifiable, and what you build will be used by engineering teams building the chips that run the world.

### What You'll Be Doing

• Lead the adaptation of foundation models to specialized engineering domains like hardware description languages, RTL design, and EDA workflows, using supervised fine-tuning, LoRA/PEFT, and synthetic data pipelines that improve correctness and coverage
• Research and implement advanced 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 and privacy-preserving designs
• Own the evaluation strategy for LLM and agent systems, building automated frameworks with LLM-as-judge pipelines, domain-specific benchmarks, pass@k metrics, and regression suites that gate model releases
• 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 combined with feature importance
• 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
• Set standards for experimental rigor across the team, including strong baselines, controlled ablations, reproducibility, error analysis, and honest reporting of negative results, and translate outcomes into publications, patents, and production-ready designs

### The Impact You Will Have

• Define the technical direction for domain-specific LLMs that generate verifiable hardware code, improving the productivity of engineering teams designing complex semiconductor systems
• Enable reasoning-enhanced models that solve multi-step planning and coding tasks with measurably higher correctness, reducing iteration cycles for engineers working in EDA workflows
• Deliver enterprise analytics agents that operate autonomously over heterogeneous structured data, automating analysis and reporting tasks that today require manual effort
• Build evaluation frameworks that become the standard for how the team measures quality, gates releases, and maintains trust in production AI systems
• Detect and remediate production ML drift before it impacts users, ensuring models remain reliable and accurate as data distributions shift over time
• Grow the technical capability of the team through mentorship, design reviews, and by setting the example for what rigorous, reproducible AI research looks like in practice
• Represent Synopsys AI research externally through publications and invention disclosures that advance the state of the art in domain-specific AI systems

### 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
• Deep expertise in PyTorch, Hugging Face ecosystem (Transformers, PEFT, TRL, Datasets, Accelerate), and distributed training frameworks like DeepSpeed or FSDP
• 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 that demonstrate both depth and engineering discipline

### Who You Are

• You do not trust a result until you have measured it three ways, ablated the components, and understood why it works, not just that it works
• You can explain a complex tradeoff between model quality, inference cost, and latency to a VP in two sentences without losing the nuance, and you can defend your technical choices in a room full of skeptical engineers
• You move between reading a new paper on process reward models in the morning and debugging a multi-GPU training pipeline in the afternoon without losing context or momentum
• You push back when an evaluation is too weak, a baseline is missing, or a launch plan does not account for how the model will actually fail in production
• You learn new technical domains quickly, whether that means understanding RTL simulation well enough to integrate it into a training loop or picking up a new statistical test to improve drift detection
• You set the standard for the team through the quality of your code, the rigor of your experiments, and the clarity of your technical writing, and you grow the people around you by reviewing their work with the same care you apply to your own

### The Team You'll Be Part Of

Your recruiter will share more about the team structure and mission during the interview process.

### Rewards and Benefits

We offer a comprehensive range of health, wellness, and financial benefits to cater to your needs. Our total rewards include both monetary and non-monetary offerings. Your recruiter will provide more details about the salary range and benefits during the hiring process.

At Synopsys, we want talented people of every background to feel valued and supported to do their best work. Synopsys considers all applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, military veteran status, or disability.

In addition to the base salary, this role may be eligible for an annual bonus, equity, and other discretionary bonuses. Synopsys offers comprehensive health, wellness, and financial benefits as part of a competitive total rewards package. The actual compensation offered will be based on a number of job-related factors, including location, skills, experience, and education. Your recruiter can share more specific details on the total rewards package upon request. The base salary range for this role is across the U.S.