Lead Software Engineer

At Cadence, we hire and develop leaders and innovators who want to make an impact on the world of technology.

About the role

We build the finite-element engine behind our electrothermal and thermomechanical simulation products — the solver that our customers use to predict temperature, warpage, and stress in advanced packages, 3D-IC stacks, and PCBs. It is a large, production C++ codebase that meshes real industrial geometry with hundreds of millions of degrees of freedom and solves it in parallel.

You will join as a R&D engineer working directly with the team of simulation developers. This is a hands-on numerical-methods role: you will own features end to end — formulation on paper, implementation in C++, verification against analytical or reference solutions, and performance work on real customer cases.

Responsibilities

• Derive, implement, and verify finite-element formulations in production C++.

• Write unit and regression tests, including verification against analytical

  solutions and benchmark problems; treat a feature as unfinished until it is tested.

• Profile and optimize solver and meshing code for large models — both runtime and memory.

• Debug numerical issues on real customer cases: non-convergence, mesh quality,   ill-conditioning, and accuracy loss.

• Write up formulations, assumptions, and validation results clearly enough that a colleague can reproduce them.

• Work with application engineers, QA, and product management to get features into  customers' hands, and respond to what comes back.

Required qualifications

• **PhD in Mechanical / Civil / Aerospace Engineering, Computational Mechanics,

  Applied Mathematics, or a related field** (new graduates welcome), **or an MS in a

  related field with 2+ years of relevant industry or research experience.**

• Solid grounding in **continuum mechanics and the finite element method**: weak

  forms, isoparametric elements, numerical integration, assembly, and the

  Newton–Raphson method for nonlinear problems.

• Working knowledge of **heat transfer and/or thermomechanical stress analysis** —

  thermal eigenstrain, CTE mismatch, and the behaviour of layered structures.

• **Strong C++ (C++11 or later)**: you can read and safely extend a large existing

  codebase, not just write greenfield code. Comfortable with pointers, memory

  ownership, templates, and a debugger.

• Familiarity with **sparse linear algebra** and at least one sparse solver or

  library.

• Ability to validate your own work: you reach for an analytical solution, a refined

  mesh, or a patch test before you claim something is correct.

• Clear written and spoken English, and a genuine willingness to work as part of a

  team — asking for review, giving it, and sharing what you learn.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with a commercial or open-source FEA code (Abaqus, ANSYS, LS-DYNA,

  COMSOL, Code_Aster, FEniCS, deal.II, MOOSE) — as a developer, not only a user.

• Nonlinear FEA: large deformation, contact, plasticity, creep, or viscoplasticity.

• Parallel programming: OpenMP, MPI, or multithreaded C++.

• Direct and iterative sparse solvers (MUMPS, PARDISO, SuperLU, hypre/BoomerAMG,

  PETSc) and graph partitioning (METIS/ParMETIS).

• Mesh generation, mesh quality metrics, or computational geometry.

• Semiconductor packaging or PCB background: 3D-IC, HBM stacks, solder reliability,

  warpage.

• Development on Windows, and on Linux; Git or Perforce.

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