Senior Director, EDA & HPC Engineering Platforms

Qualcomm • San Diego, CA

1d • $229,800 - $344,600 • Onsite

About The Position

Qualcomm is seeking a strategic, hands-on Senior Director to lead the vision, architecture, and global operations of the compute, data, and development infrastructure supporting silicon and systems engineering. The role owns an end-to-end portfolio encompassing HPC grids and intelligent scheduling; EDA license orchestration; source code and design data management; Linux/Unix and container platforms; observability; analytics and data engineering; and engineering IP protection. The position defines a multi-year modernization roadmap across on-premises data centers and hybrid cloud, sets enterprise technical standards, and builds a high-performing organization that partners with design and CAD teams. The role has significant influence on engineering productivity, tape-out schedules, infrastructure investment, and protection of company intellectual property. The position is based in San Diego and requires working in the office five days a week.

The Senior Director sets strategy, target-state architecture, and investment plans; leads a global organization of Directors, Managers, Architects, and SREs; serves as the executive infrastructure contact for engineering and corporate partners; governs architecture and technical standards; and owns operating plans, budgets, and capacity investments. The role oversees HPC scheduling and heterogeneous compute, EDA license management, enterprise SCM and design data platforms, Linux/Unix and container infrastructure, analytics and data engineering, observability and reliability, IP protection and access control, hybrid/cloud HPC, and vendor relationships.

Success in the first 12–18 months includes publishing an endorsed multi-year strategy and architecture; improving job wait times, grid utilization, and license denial rates; starting or completing a legacy SCM migration; delivering trusted self-service analytics; defining SLOs and improving service availability and recovery; strengthening IP protection and audit coverage; delivering production-grade hybrid cloud HPC with cost and performance governance; and developing a stable leadership team with succession plans.

Candidates should bring extensive progressive experience in HPC, EDA infrastructure, or engineering IT, including leadership of multi-level organizations. The role requires deep expertise in large-scale compute grids and multi-vendor EDA flows, IBM LSF scheduler operations, EDA license management, enterprise SCM, Linux/Unix engineering, containers, analytics, observability, engineering IP protection, budget ownership, vendor governance, and executive communication. A bachelor's degree with substantial related experience or equivalent experience without a bachelor's degree satisfies the stated minimum experience pathway; relevant advanced degrees may substitute for up to two years of general IT-related work experience. A bachelor's degree in a related field is preferred, and a master's degree is preferred.

Requirements

• 10+ years of IT-related work experience with a bachelor's degree, or 12+ years without a bachelor's degree; completed relevant advanced degrees may substitute for up to two years of general IT-related experience.
• 7+ years of supervisory or leadership experience.
• 3+ years of work experience in a role requiring interaction with senior leadership, such as VP level and above.
• 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 is required, including queue and fairshare policy, wrappers and pre-execs, and migration/dual-run strategies.
• Strong experience with EDA license management, including FlexNet/FlexLM, RLM, and license-aware scheduling.
• Hands-on leadership of enterprise SCM platforms, including Git/GitHub, Perforce, and DesignSync, and experience with 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, including Apptainer/Singularity, Docker, and Kubernetes, in HPC or engineering environments.
• Demonstrated leadership of analytics and data engineering initiatives, including data pipelines, analytics databases, and BI tools.
• Proven observability leadership, including SLIs/SLOs, alert fidelity, runbooks, and 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 and ability to translate complex technical topics into business outcomes.

Nice To Haves

• Experience leading hybrid or cloud HPC for EDA workloads on AWS, Azure, or GCP, including FinOps practices.
• Experience with high-performance storage platforms such as NetApp, Weka, GPFS/Storage Scale, Lustre, or VAST.
• Familiarity with CI/CD and DevOps tooling such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, and Artifactory.
• Experience applying AI/ML to scheduling, capacity forecasting, or operational analytics.
• Experience supporting export-controlled or regulated engineering programs.
• Scripting and automation proficiency in Python, Bash, Perl, or Tcl.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer/Electrical Engineering, or a related field; a master's degree is preferred.
• Strongly preferred experience with Altair PBS/Accelerator and Slurm scheduler operations.

Responsibilities

• Define and own the multi-year strategy, target-state architecture, and investment roadmap for EDA/HPC platforms, aligned with engineering milestones and business priorities.
• Lead a global organization of Directors, Managers, Architects, and SREs; develop succession plans and career frameworks and foster operational excellence, ownership, and continuous improvement.
• Serve as executive point of contact for EDA/HPC infrastructure with engineering leadership, CAD, Security, Legal, Finance, Procurement, and Facilities.
• Govern architecture through Architecture Decision Records, design reviews, and technical standards across platform domains.
• Own the annual operating plan, budget, and capacity investments; present business cases, ROI, and TCO analysis to executive leadership.
• Define target-state multi-scheduler operations, 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 for CPU architectures, high-memory nodes, GPUs, and accelerators based on EDA workload profiles.
• Own EDA license management strategy and infrastructure across major vendors; implement license-aware scheduling, usage governance, and policy controls.
• Deliver license utilization analytics to inform vendor negotiations, renewals, and true-up decisions with Procurement and Finance.
• Own strategy, architecture, and operations for enterprise SCM and design data management platforms.
• Define an SCM roadmap, rationalize legacy platforms, and plan migrations that preserve history, traceability, and IP integrity.
• Establish standards for branching, workspace management, large-file and binary handling, global replication, and large-repository performance.
• Integrate SCM with CI/CD, regression systems, artifact repositories, code review, and quality tools.
• Ensure SCM platforms meet high-availability, backup and recovery, access-control, and audit requirements.
• Partner with CAD and methodology teams on design data management for hardware workflows.
• Own enterprise Linux/Unix engineering platforms, including OS lifecycle, hardening, patching, and EDA tool compatibility certification.
• Drive infrastructure-as-code and configuration management with automated, repeatable, auditable provisioning.
• Lead container adoption for HPC and engineering workloads and use orchestration platforms where appropriate.
• Define standards for golden images, tool packaging, environment modules, and reproducible engineering environments across on-premises and cloud environments.
• Partner with storage and infrastructure teams on high-performance storage, data tiering, and EDA workload I/O performance.
• 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 ingesting scheduler, license, storage, SCM, and infrastructure data.
• Deliver dashboards and self-service analytics covering utilization, job wait times, license efficiency, storage growth, cost allocation, and engineering productivity.
• Develop 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 scheduling and operations.
• Build a converged observability stack for metrics, logs, and traces.
• Define SLIs and SLOs for critical engineering services, with 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.
• 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 to prevent IP contamination while enabling productive collaboration.
• Partner with Information Security, Legal, and Compliance on regulatory, contractual, and export-control requirements.
• Integrate identity and access management across platforms.
• Define hybrid HPC strategy and reference architectures for cloud burst and cloud-native EDA execution.
• Establish cloud 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 safely and economically move pilots into production.
• 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.

Benefits

• Competitive annual discretionary bonus program, except for employees on sales-incentive plans.
• Opportunity for annual RSU grants.
• Competitive benefits package designed to support success at work, at home, and at play.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed