Senior Director of EDA & HPC Engineering Platforms

Company:

Qualcomm Incorporated

Job Area:

Information Technology Group, Information Technology Group > IT Management

General Summary:

About the Role 

We are seeking a strategic, hands-on Senior Director of EDA & HPC Engineering Platforms to lead the vision, architecture, and global operations of the compute, data, and development infrastructure behind our silicon and systems engineering. 

This leader will own an end-to-end portfolio spanning HPC grids and intelligent scheduling, EDA license orchestration, source code and design data management (SCM), Linux/Unix and container platforms, observability, analytics and data engineering, and engineering IP protection. You will define a multi-year modernization roadmap across on-premises data centers and hybrid cloud, set enterprise technical standards, and build a high-performing organization that design and CAD teams see as a true engineering partner. 

This is a senior leadership role with significant influence on engineering productivity, tape-out schedules, infrastructure investment, and the security of our most valuable intellectual property.

**Position Requires to be in San Diego, in office 5 days a week

Minimum Qualifications:

• 10+ years of IT-related work experience with a Bachelor's degree.
OR
12+ years of IT-related work experience without a Bachelor’s degree.

• 7+ years of supervisory or leadership experience.
• 3+ years of work experience in a role requiring interaction with senior leadership (e.g., VP level and above).

*Completed advanced degrees in a relevant field may be substituted for up to two years (Master’s = one year, Doctorate = two years) of the general IT-related work experience.

What You Will Do

Strategy & Organizational Leadership

• Define and own the multi-year strategy, target-state architecture, and investment roadmap for EDA/HPC platforms, aligned with engineering program milestones and business priorities.

• Lead a global organization of Directors, Managers, Architects, and SREs; build succession plans, career frameworks, and a culture of operational excellence, ownership, and continuous improvement.

• Serve as the executive point of contact for EDA/HPC infrastructure with engineering leadership, CAD, Security, Legal, Finance, Procurement, and Facilities.

• Govern architecture through Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), design reviews, and technical standards across all platform domains.

• Own the annual operating plan, budget, and capacity investments; present business cases, ROI, and TCO analysis to executive leadership.

HPC Grid & Intelligent Scheduling

• Define the target state for multi-scheduler operations (IBM LSF, Altair PBS Pro/Accelerator, Slurm), including queue design, fairshare models, preemption, reservations, and resource guardrails.

• Lead scheduler modernization, consolidation, and migration programs using dual-run strategies that minimize disruption to active design programs.

• Deliver job submission APIs, workflow and pipeline orchestration, interactive and session scheduling, and self-service capabilities for engineering users.

• Ensure high availability, disaster recovery, and performance at scale across global data centers.

• Drive heterogeneous compute strategy (CPU architectures, high-memory nodes, GPU/accelerators) aligned with EDA workload profiles.

EDA License Orchestration

• Own license management strategy across major EDA vendors (Synopsys, Cadence, Siemens EDA, Ansys, and others), including FlexLM/FlexNet, RLM, and license server infrastructure.

• Integrate license-aware scheduling, rusage governance, and policy controls to reduce denials, improve throughput and fairness, and simplify cross-cluster feature management.

• Deliver license utilization analytics that inform vendor negotiations, renewals, and true-up decisions, in partnership with Procurement and Finance.

Source Code & Design Data Management (SCM)

• Own the strategy, architecture, and operations for enterprise SCM and design data management platforms, including Git/GitHub Enterprise, GitLab, Bitbucket, Perforce Helix Core, Dassault DesignSync, IBM ClearCase, Subversion (SVN), and related systems.

• Define a forward-looking SCM roadmap, including rationalization of legacy platforms (e.g., ClearCase, SVN) and migration strategies that preserve history, traceability, and IP integrity.

• Establish standards for branching, workspace management, large-file and binary handling, replication across global sites, and performance for large design repositories.

• Integrate SCM with CI/CD pipelines, regression systems, artifact repositories (JFrog Artifactory, Nexus), and code review and quality tools.

• Ensure SCM platforms meet requirements for high availability, backup and recovery, access control, and audit.

• Partner with CAD and methodology teams on design data management for hardware workflows (RTL, verification, physical design, analog/mixed-signal).

Linux/Unix, Compute & Container Platforms

• Own the enterprise Linux/Unix engineering platform (RHEL, Rocky Linux, SUSE, and legacy Unix as needed), including OS lifecycle, hardening, patching, and EDA tool compatibility certification.

• Drive infrastructure-as-code and configuration management at scale (Ansible, Terraform, Puppet/Salt) with automated, repeatable, and auditable provisioning.

• Lead container adoption for HPC and engineering workloads (Apptainer/Singularity, Docker, Podman) and orchestration platforms (Kubernetes, OpenShift) where appropriate.

• Define standards for golden images, tool packaging, environment modules, and reproducible engineering environments across on-premises and cloud.

• Partner with storage and infrastructure teams on high-performance storage (NetApp, Weka, IBM Storage Scale/GPFS, Lustre, VAST, or similar), data tiering, and I/O performance for EDA workloads.

Analytics & Data Engineering

• Build and lead an analytics and data engineering function that turns platform telemetry into decision systems for engineering and executive stakeholders.

• Architect scalable data pipelines and platforms (e.g., Kafka, Spark, Airflow, ClickHouse, Snowflake, Databricks, or similar) that ingest scheduler, license, storage, SCM, and infrastructure data.

• Productize dashboards and self-service analytics (Tableau, Power BI, Grafana, or similar) covering utilization, job wait times, license efficiency, storage growth, cost allocation, and engineering productivity.

• Deliver capacity planning and forecasting models, including predictive and ML-driven approaches, tied to program schedules and tape-out demand.

• Establish data governance, quality standards, data catalogs, and chargeback/showback models.

• Explore AI/ML opportunities for intelligent scheduling, anomaly detection, failure prediction, and workload optimization.

Telemetry, Observability & Reliability

• Build a converged observability stack for metrics, logs, and traces (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch, Splunk, or commercial APM).

• Define SLIs and SLOs for critical engineering services, with high-signal alerting, canaries, runbooks, and error budgets.

• Implement auto-remediation and self-healing capabilities such as job throttling, host quarantine, intelligent routing, and automated failover.

• Lead incident management, post-incident reviews, problem management, and a predictable change and release cadence.

Engineering IP Protection & Access Control

• Lead engineering IP classification and least-privilege access models across compute, storage, SCM, and collaboration platforms.

• Implement secure enclaves and containment for sensitive programs, third-party IP, customer and partner collaboration, and export-controlled data.

• Build monitoring, audit, and data loss prevention pipelines that prevent IP contamination while enabling productive collaboration.

• Partner with Information Security, Legal, and Compliance on regulatory, contractual, and export control requirements (e.g., ITAR/EAR where applicable).

• Integrate identity and access management (LDAP/Active Directory, SSO, RBAC/ABAC, privileged access management) across platforms.

Hybrid & Cloud HPC

• Define the hybrid HPC strategy and reference architectures for cloud burst and cloud-native EDA execution (AWS, Azure, GCP).

• Establish patterns for images and tooling, data locality and transfer, object storage, license connectivity, security, and cost/performance visibility.

• Lead FinOps practices for cloud spend governance, and graduate pilots to production safely and economically.

Vendor & Partner Management

• Own strategic relationships with EDA vendors, hardware OEMs, scheduler and SCM vendors, storage providers, and cloud partners.

• Lead contract negotiations, renewals, and vendor performance governance in partnership with Procurement.

What Success Looks Like (First 12–18 Months)

• A published multi-year EDA/HPC platform strategy and target-state architecture endorsed by engineering and IT leadership.

• Measurable improvements in job wait times, grid utilization, and license denial rates.

• An SCM rationalization roadmap with at least one legacy platform migration underway or completed.

• A production analytics platform delivering trusted, self-service insights on utilization, cost, and capacity.

• Defined SLOs for critical services, with improved availability and reduced mean time to recovery.

• A strengthened IP protection posture with documented classification, enclave patterns, and audit coverage.

• A production-grade hybrid cloud HPC capability with clear cost and performance governance.

• A stable, engaged, and growing leadership team with clear roles and succession plans.

What You Will Bring

• 15+ years of progressive experience in HPC, EDA infrastructure, or engineering IT, including 8+ years leading multi-level organizations (managers of managers).

• Deep expertise operating mission-critical, large-scale compute grids running multi-vendor EDA flows in semiconductor, systems, or similar engineering environments.

• Mastery of scheduler design and operations (IBM LSF required; Altair PBS/Accelerator and Slurm strongly preferred), including queue and fairshare policy, wrappers and pre-execs, and migration/dual-run strategies.

• Strong experience with EDA license management (FlexNet/FlexLM, RLM) and license-aware scheduling.

• Hands-on leadership of enterprise SCM platforms, including Git/GitHub, Perforce, and DesignSync, with experience in ClearCase or other legacy system migrations.

• Strong foundation in Linux/Unix systems engineering at scale, configuration management, and infrastructure-as-code.

• Proven experience with containers and orchestration (Apptainer/Singularity, Docker, Kubernetes) in HPC or engineering environments.

• Demonstrated leadership of analytics and data engineering initiatives, including data pipelines, analytics databases (e.g., ClickHouse, Snowflake), and BI tools (e.g., Tableau, Power BI).

• Proven observability leadership (SLIs/SLOs, alert fidelity, runbooks, self-healing) with hands-on experience in Prometheus/Grafana and/or enterprise APM.

• Strong background in engineering IP protection, including classification, RBAC/DRM, secure enclaves, monitoring, and audits, working closely with Security and Legal.

• Track record of owning large budgets, building business cases, and leading vendor and contract governance.

• Exceptional executive communication skills, with the ability to translate complex technical topics into business outcomes.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience leading hybrid or cloud HPC for EDA workloads on AWS, Azure, or GCP, including FinOps practices.

• Experience with high-performance storage platforms (NetApp, Weka, GPFS/Storage Scale, Lustre, VAST).

• Familiarity with CI/CD and DevOps tooling (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Artifactory).

• Experience applying AI/ML to scheduling, capacity forecasting, or operational analytics.

• Experience supporting export-controlled or regulated engineering programs.

• Scripting and automation proficiency (Python, Bash, Perl, Tcl).

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer/Electrical Engineering, or a related field; Master's degree preferred.

Leadership Competencies

• Strategic Vision: Sets a clear, compelling direction and aligns teams and stakeholders behind it.

• Technical Credibility: Earns the respect of senior engineers and architects and is comfortable going deep when needed.

• Operational Excellence: Runs a disciplined, metrics-driven organization with predictable execution.

• Customer Partnership: Treats design and CAD teams as customers and measures success by their productivity.

• Talent Builder: Attracts, develops, and retains top technical talent and builds strong leadership benches.

• Influence & Collaboration: Builds trust across Engineering, Security, Finance, Legal, and external partners.

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EEO Employer: Qualcomm is an equal opportunity employer; all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, Veteran status, or any other protected classification.

Qualcomm expects its employees to abide by all applicable policies and procedures, including but not limited to security and other requirements regarding protection of Company confidential information and other confidential and/or proprietary information, to the extent those requirements are permissible under applicable law.

Pay range and Other Compensation & Benefits:

$229,800.00 - $344,600.00

The above pay scale reflects the broad, minimum to maximum, pay scale for this job code for the location for which it has been posted. Even more importantly, please note that salary is only one component of total compensation at Qualcomm.  We also offer a competitive annual discretionary bonus program and opportunity for annual RSU grants (employees on sales-incentive plans are not eligible for our annual bonus).  In addition, our highly competitive benefits package is designed to support your success at work, at home, and at play. Your recruiter will be happy to discuss all that Qualcomm has to offer – and you can review more details about our US benefits at this link.

If you would like more information about this role, please contact Qualcomm Careers.