Applied ML Director (Technical Team Lead)

What You'll Do

• Lead & Mentor: Manage and grow a high-performing team of ML and software engineers.
• Foster a culture of technical excellence, continuous learning, and rapid execution.
• Hands-On Technical Leadership: Drive the technical vision and actively contribute to the codebase.
• Design, implement, and review scalable infrastructure for AI agents within the ChipStack SuperAgent ecosystem.
• Architect Production AI: Guide the development of robust evaluation frameworks, data pipelines, retrieval systems (RAG), and context-engineering strategies to ensure consistent, grounded, and aligned agent behavior.
• Operational Excellence: Oversee continuous integration, automated testing, and observability systems.
• Make high-level architectural decisions to optimize system performance across latency, cost, reliability, and scalability.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with product management, research, and core engineering teams to align the AI roadmap with overarching EDA platform goals.
• Required Qualifications Education: MS or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field.
• Leadership Experience: 3+ years of direct engineering management or formal technical lead experience, with a proven track record of successfully mentoring engineers and delivering complex projects.
• Engineering Fundamentals: 7+ years of hands-on software engineering and ML experience.
• You must possess deep expertise in design, refactoring, debugging, and testing distributed systems—and you should still be comfortable writing production-quality code today.
• LLM Expertise: Deep understanding of large language models (LLMs) and the practical realities of deploying them in production (latency, cost, reliability, monitoring, and failure analysis).
• System Evaluation: Experience designing rigorous evaluation frameworks for AI systems, including benchmarking and regression testing.
• Skills of Interest Agent Architecture: Hands-on experience with reason–act loops, planning/self-correction patterns, tool/function calling, persistent memory systems, and structured outputs.
• LLM Engineering: Familiarity with frontier LLMs and trade-offs across model families; practical experience with prompt engineering, context management, and model alignment techniques.
• Retrieval & Data Systems: Deep understanding of RAG pipelines, embeddings, indexing strategies, chunking methodologies, and grounding techniques.
• Infrastructure & Observability: Experience building logging, tracing, monitoring, and evaluation systems specifically tailored for ML/AI applications.
• Domain Interest: A strong interest in semiconductor design, EDA workflows, and high-performance computing environments (prior EDA experience is a plus, but not required ).
• Our Culture Challenge the status quo: We are innovators who challenge industry norms and push forward our vision of how silicon should be built.
• Strong opinions, loosely held: We are low on ego, but high on collaboration.
• We are okay to be wrong and are always open to learning.
• Ship fast, ship quality: We ruthlessly prioritize what matters.
• We build at lightning speed, but never compromise on the high standards required by the semiconductor industry.
• Proud of our craft: Attention to detail is in our DNA.
• We take pride in what we build and go the extra mile to ensure an exceptional experience for our users.
• The annual salary range for California is $178,500 to $331,500.
• You may also be eligible to receive incentive compensation: bonus, equity, and benefits.
• Sales positions generally offer a competitive On Target Earnings (OTE) incentive compensation structure.
• Please note that the salary range is a guideline and compensation may vary based on factors such as qualifications, skill level, competencies and work location.
• Our benefits programs include: paid vacation and paid holidays, 401(k) plan with employer match, employee stock purchase plan, a variety of medical, dental and vision plan options, and more.
• We’re doing work that matters.
• Help us solve what others can’t.