What are the responsibilities and job description for the Technical Director, Digital Design Methodology & Flow Architecture position at NXP Semiconductors?
Role Overview
The Technical Director, Digital Design Methodology & Flow Architecture will define and deploy a repeatable, traceable, and customizable end-to-end digital design flow for advanced process technologies. The role combines RTL-to-GDS implementation expertise, static verification, PPA optimization, AI tool enablement, and hands-on agentic flow development.
Key Responsibilities
NXP is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer regardless of age, color, national origin, race, religion, creed, gender, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, marital status, status as a disabled veteran and/or veteran of the Vietnam Era or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local law. In addition, NXP will provide reasonable accommodations for otherwise qualified disabled individuals.
The Technical Director, Digital Design Methodology & Flow Architecture will define and deploy a repeatable, traceable, and customizable end-to-end digital design flow for advanced process technologies. The role combines RTL-to-GDS implementation expertise, static verification, PPA optimization, AI tool enablement, and hands-on agentic flow development.
Key Responsibilities
- Architect a modular RTL-to-GDS flow supporting synthesis, place and route, timing/power closure, static verification, signoff, and GDS delivery.
- Enable agentic execution, AI-assisted debugging, design-space exploration, and automated analysis loops for EDA workflows.
- Establish repeatable and traceable flow practices, including standard recipes, configuration baselines, metrics, dashboards, audit trails, regression checks, and release management.
- Deploy flows for new process technologies in partnership with design, CAD/methodology, foundry, and EDA vendor teams.
- Improve productivity, turnaround time, quality-of-results, and PPA through automation, methodology tuning, and scalable reuse.
- Education: B.S. in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field required; M.S. or Ph.D. preferred.
- Level: Director of Technology-level technical leader of digital design, CAD/methodology, EDA implementation, or flow architecture experience.
- Scope: Proven ability to set technical direction, influence senior stakeholders, and lead cross-functional flow transformation across functional domains or technology nodes.
- Deep hands-on experience in end-to-end digital implementation, RTL-to-GDS, static design and timing analysis, formal/static verification, signoff, ECO, and PPA closure.
- Strong expertise in synthesis, floorplanning, place and route, clock-tree synthesis, power optimization, congestion analysis, and advanced-node implementation challenges.
- Hands-on agentic AI workflow development experience, including task planning, tool invocation, result interpretation, retry logic, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, and autonomous execution patterns.
- Practical MCP experience, including MCP clients/servers, tool and resource exposure, secure access, JSON-RPC-style communication, and integration with engineering systems.
- Strong scripting and automation skills using Tcl, Python, Perl, shell, or equivalent flow automation technologies.
- Experience with major EDA ecosystems such as Synopsys, Cadence, Siemens EDA, or equivalent internal platforms.
- Ability to translate design challenges into repeatable methodology improvements, reusable automation, and measurable productivity gains.
- Experience defining and executing deployment and migration strategies from current script-driven digital design flows to goal-driven agentic flows, including phased rollout, MCP/tool-adapter integration, validation against golden flows, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, observability, governance, rollback planning, and production adoption across RTL-to-GDS workflows.
- Experience with AI-enabled EDA, agent orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation, multi-agent workflows, and workflow state management.
- Experience developing MCP-enabled connectors or tool adapters for EDA tools, job schedulers, dashboards, repositories, databases, or compute environments.
- Experience building production-quality flows with observability, auditability, permission control, evaluation harnesses, regression validation, documentation, and release management.
NXP is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer regardless of age, color, national origin, race, religion, creed, gender, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, marital status, status as a disabled veteran and/or veteran of the Vietnam Era or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local law. In addition, NXP will provide reasonable accommodations for otherwise qualified disabled individuals.