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. We’re doing work that matters. Help us solve what others can’t.