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
Salary Range
The pay range below is for Bay Area California only. Actual salary may vary based on a number of factors including job location, job-related knowledge, skills, experiences, trainings, etc. We also offer incentive opportunities that reward employees based on individual and company performance.
$221.5K - $326.3K USD
#LI-CG1
We use artificial intelligence to screen, assess, or select applicants for the position.
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
Top Skills
What We Do
Altera: Accelerating Innovators
Altera provides leadership programmable solutions that are easy-to-use and deploy in applications from cloud to edge, offering limitless AI possibilities. Our end-to-end broad portfolio of products including FPGAs, CPLDs, Intellectual Property, development tools, System on Modules, SmartNICs and IPUs provide the flexibility to accelerate innovation. Altera is helping to shape the future through pioneering innovation that unlocks extraordinary possibilities for everyone on the planet.








