R&D Engineering, Sr Engineer - PathFinder-SC

Date posted 09/03/2026

Category Engineering****Hire Type Employee****Job ID 18623****Remote Eligible No****Date Posted 09/03/2026

We Are Synopsys is the leader in engineering solutions from silicon to systems, enabling customers to rapidly innovate AI-powered products. We deliver industry-leading silicon design, IP, simulation and analysis solutions, and design services. We partner closely with our customers across a wide range of industries to maximize their R&D capability and productivity, powering innovation today that ignites the ingenuity of tomorrow.

You Are

You have spent years writing C++ that actually ships, not prototypes that get rewritten, production code that customers depend on to close timing, route chips, and meet tapeout deadlines. You know the difference between code that works on your machine and code that scales across distributed systems with terabytes of design data, and you have debugged enough memory leaks and race conditions to spot the warning signs three commits before they become production incidents.

You do not need a perfect spec to start coding. When requirements are thin, you ask the right questions, sketch out the design with your tech lead, and start building the part you know is solid while the rest gets clarified. You are comfortable working in a large codebase where understanding the existing architecture matters as much as writing new features.

Optimization is not a nice-to-have for you. You care about runtime, memory footprint, and whether your code will actually perform when a customer throws a 50-million-instance design at it. You write tests because you have seen what happens when you do not. At Synopsys, you will work on PathFinder-SC tools that power physical design workflows used by semiconductor companies worldwide, and the code you write will directly affect how fast and how well those chips get built.

What You'll Be Doing

• Develop and maintain features for PathFinder-SC products, working in a large C++ codebase with a focus on performance, scalability, and maintainability
• Collaborate with your manager and team to define new functionality, then own and deliver mid-sized projects independently once requirements are clear
• Diagnose and fix bugs across the codebase, including memory issues, performance bottlenecks, and logic errors in complex systems
• Optimize code for runtime speed and memory efficiency, ensuring tools perform well on large-scale semiconductor designs
• Write unit tests, regression tests, and system-level tests to validate new features and changes before they ship
• Communicate technical decisions and changes clearly to your manager, tech leads, and other engineers, especially when your work impacts their code
• Serve as a technical reference for other engineers on the project team, helping them navigate the codebase and solve design problems

The Impact You Will Have

• Your code will power PathFinder-SC tools used by semiconductor companies to route and optimize chips that go into everything from smartphones to data centers
• Features you build will directly improve designer productivity, helping customers close timing faster and meet tapeout schedules
• Optimizations you implement will reduce tool runtime and memory usage, enabling designers to work with larger, more complex designs
• Tests you write will catch issues before they reach customers, improving product quality and reducing support escalations
• Your technical guidance will help other engineers on the team deliver better code faster
• The distributed processing improvements you contribute will scale PathFinder-SC tools to handle the next generation of semiconductor designs
• Your work will strengthen Synopsys' position as the leader in physical design automation

What You'll Need

• Bachelor's in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or related field with 5 years of software development experience, or Master's with 3 years of experience
• Strong C++ programming skills with deep understanding of object-oriented design, STL, memory management, and modern C++ features
• Solid foundation in data structures, algorithms, and debugging techniques, with the ability to diagnose and fix complex issues in production code
• Ability to quickly learn and understand complex systems, and work closely with others to deliver solutions
• Track record of delivering high-quality work on time in a professional software development environment
• Experience with large-scale commercial software development is a strong plus
• Experience developing physical design or analysis tools for semiconductor workflows is a strong plus
• Experience developing, debugging, or optimizing distributed processing systems is a strong plus
• Proficiency in both C++ and Python is a strong plus

Who You Are

• You can read someone else's code, understand the intent, and extend it without breaking existing functionality or creating technical debt
• When a bug shows up in production, you do not guess, you reproduce it, isolate the root cause, and fix it in a way that prevents similar issues downstream
• You can explain a technical tradeoff to a senior engineer in a design review and defend your approach with data, not just intuition
• You know when to optimize and when to ship, and you do not over-engineer solutions for problems that do not exist yet
• You write code that other engineers can read six months later without needing you to explain it
• You are comfortable working in a global team across time zones, where clear written communication and well-documented code matter as much as technical skill

The Team You'll Be Part Of

You will join the PathFinder-SC development team in Chengdu, working on high-performance physical design tools that are part of Synopsys's core EDA portfolio. The team collaborates closely with engineers across global sites to deliver features that directly impact semiconductor design workflows. Your recruiter will