Altera
AI Lead Architect - Silicon Design Execution
San Jose, California, United States · Senior
Stay score
odds of building a lasting career here
Sponsors, but it's cap-subject — you still face the weighted lottery (~61% per draw at Level IV). Good if you win; have a cap-exempt backup on your list.
Lottery odds assume a STEM candidate.
Personalize to your clock →H-1B wage level
the lottery is wage-weighted — each level is one more entry
$14,974 more — $221,374 — moves this role to Level III and 3 lottery entries. That figure is inside the range the employer already advertised.
Based on the DOL prevailing wage for this occupation and worksite, a base salary of $221,374 would place this position at wage Level III. That figure is within the posted range, and I'd like to target it. This role classifies under "Software Developers" for prevailing-wage purposes.
DOL prevailing wage, 2026-27 wage year · Software Developers (15-1252) · San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. Wage level is derived by USCIS from the offered wage, occupation and worksite; the occupation shown is inferred from the job title.
Employer immigration record
from this employer's Department of Labor filings
Files H-1B transfers
Sourced from Department of Labor LCA, PERM and prevailing-wage disclosure data. Employer matching is by name, so figures may be split across an employer's legal entities. Absence of a filing means none appears in our copy of the data, not that none exists.
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About the role
- The role carries no direct reports; impact comes through technical leadership, influence, and cross-team partnership rather than management authority.
- Measure and communicate impact: Define success metrics for AI initiatives (e.g., turnaround-time reduction, quality-of-results improvement, engineer productivity) and report progress to leadership.
- Mentor and uplift: Elevate AI/ML fluency across engineering teams through coaching, documentation, and hands-on collaboration, without formal management responsibility.
Responsibilities
- Define AI strategy: Develop and own a coherent strategy for how AI/ML is applied across hardware design, verification, and implementation, aligned to business priorities and engineering roadmaps.
- Drive deployment, not just proof-of-concept: Lead the end-to-end path from identifying opportunities to piloting, validating, and deploying AI-driven tools and methods into production design, verification, and implementation flows.
- Build and own the AI tooling stack: Specify, prototype, and productionize the tooling engineers actually use - retrieval over design collateral, specs, and historical debug data
- Own evaluation and operational discipline: Establish how AI tools are benchmarked, versioned, monitored, and retired, so adoption decisions rest on measured accuracy and engineer hours saved rather than demo quality.
- Build the data foundation: Partner with CAD and IT to make design, verification, and signoff telemetry usable for ML - access, provenance, quality, and the IP-protection constraints that govern what can be used where.
- Partner across the organization: Work directly with design, verification, DFT, implementation, and EDA tooling teams to understand workflow pain points and co-develop AI-based solutions that fit real engineering practice.
- Act as a change agent: Build organizational buy-in for new AI-enabled workflows, addressing skepticism, workflow disruption, and adoption risk with credibility earned through hands-on hardware/EDA expertise.
- Evaluate technology and vendors: Assess emerging AI/ML techniques, internal tooling, and third-party/EDA-vendor AI offerings for applicability to Altera's design flows, and make build-vs-buy recommendations.
- Technical credibility in hardware design and AI/ML - able to earn trust from engineering teams and speak authoritatively on both domains.
- Influence without authority - able to drive change and adoption across teams without formal reporting lines.
Requirements
- Working proficiency in Python and modern ML/LLM tooling, with hands-on experience in at least one of: LLM fine-tuning or post-training
- Track record of leading technical initiatives and driving adoption of new methodologies across engineering teams without direct management authority.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to present strategy and progress to senior leadership.
- BS/MS/PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Working proficiency in
- We use artificial intelligence to screen, assess, or select applicants for the position. Applicants must be eligible for any required U.S. export authorizations.
- Applicants must be eligible for any required U.S. export authorizations.
- 12+ years of hands-on experience in semiconductor/hardware design, verification, or implementation, with deep familiarity with EDA tools and flows.
- Demonstrated experience applying AI/ML techniques to real engineering workflows, ideally within chip design, verification, or physical implementation.
Nice to have
- Experience operating at a senior individual-contributor level (Principal/Distinguished Engineer or equivalent), influencing strategy and roadmap decisions.
- Shift 1 (United States of America)
- San Jose, California, United States
- Posting Statement:
Compensation
- 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.
- $206,400 - $303,250 USD
Company info
- Executive presence and diplomacy - comfortable navigating high-stakes, ambiguous, or contentious technical discussions with senior stakeholders and customers.
- Engage senior stakeholders and customers: Represent Altera's AI-in-design strategy and progress to senior internal stakeholders and, where relevant, customers and partners - building rapport and trust in technical conversations that carry real ambiguity and challenge.
This listing is sourced directly from Altera's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.