Senior Director / Vice President of Software Engineering – Front-End Design Tools & AI Acceleration (EDA + Agentic AI)

We’re seeking a Senior Director or Vice President of Software Engineering (title commensurate with experience) to lead the development of Altera’s flagship FPGA design platform — Quartus! This is a high-impact leadership role with a dual mandate:

• Delivering world-class front-end EDA tools, and

• Reimagining the FPGA development experience in the AI era — including AI-accelerated workloads and agentic design experiences.

You’ll lead a talented, mission-driven engineering team (~100+ engineers), manage a diverse suite of tools, and help drive a transformative AI-first strategy that positions FPGAs at the center of tomorrow’s compute stack.

Your Mission

-Drive the Future of Agentic, AI-Powered Design

-Lead the transformation toward intelligent and contextual development environments, powered by the latest in AI/LLM technology.

• Define the vision for AI-assisted design using LLMs and agentic workflows

• Build IDE integrations and tooling copilots tailored for FPGA developers

• Partner closely with product, UX, and AI platform teams to deliver seamless, intelligent experiences

-Lead and Scale a World-Class EDA Tooling Team

-Oversee the full-stack development of Quartus front-end tools, including:

• Design entrance (schematic/coding interfaces)

• GUI frameworks

• IP integration and reuse

• Timing analysis and debug environments

• Core infrastructure and design databases

-Foster technical excellence, reliable execution, and high product quality. Build a culture of innovation and ownership across the team.

-Enable AI Acceleration Through Smarter FPGA Development

-Accelerating AI workloads is a priority — and FPGA design must evolve to meet it. You will:

• Collaborate with architecture and hardware teams to ensure the front-end tooling supports AI acceleration use cases, including custom dataflow and ML model mapping

• Drive integration of AI-specific IPs, reference designs, and optimization flows

• Ensure the design environment is intuitive and scalable for engineers building AI/ML solutions on FPGAs

What You Bring

Core Experience

• Proven leadership of large-scale engineering teams (preferably 50+ engineers)

• Deep understanding of EDA tools and FPGA development workflows

• Technical fluency in GUI/IDE frameworks, design data models, and toolchain integration

• Familiarity with hardware/software co-design and FPGA-based acceleration

AI-First, Future-Forward Thinking

• Experience with or strong interest in AI/ML acceleration on FPGA platforms

• Understanding of agentic AI, LLM copilots, and developer-facing AI tools

• Familiarity with platforms like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf, or equivalent

• Ability to translate innovation into usable, production-ready tools

Leadership & Communication

• Strong communicator and cross-functional collaborator

• Capable of influencing senior stakeholders and aligning teams toward a shared vision

• Committed to mentorship, diversity, and building a healthy engineering culture