Sr. Principal Software Engineer (Automation/Tooling)

Cadence · China

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At Cadence, we hire and develop leaders and innovators who want to make an impact on the world of technology. Position Summary

We are seeking a Senior Principal Software Engineer to provide strategic technical leadership in tooling, automation, and DevOps for large-scale engineering software delivery. This role is responsible for architecting and driving scalable developer productivity platforms, build and release automation, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure automation, quality gates, observability, and engineering workflow modernization. The successful candidate will act as a senior technical authority and hands-on individual contributor, partnering across the various engineering, QA, architecture, and IT teams to deliver build and QA tools.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect, design, and lead enterprise-scale tooling, automation, and DevOps solutions that improve engineering productivity, software quality, release efficiency, and operational reliability.
• Provide technical leadership for CI/CD pipelines, build systems, release automation, test automation frameworks, deployment workflows, environment provisioning, and developer productivity platforms.
• Drive automation across the software development life cycle, including requirements traceability, code integration, static analysis, automated testing, packaging, release validation, deployment, monitoring, and feedback loops.
• Establish DevOps best practices for source control strategy, branching and merging, build reproducibility, artifact management, configuration management, infrastructure as code, secrets management, and secure software delivery.
• Partner with engineering, QA, security, IT, architecture, and product teams to translate business and engineering needs into scalable technical solutions and implementation roadmaps.
• Guide and mentor engineers on automation design, DevOps practices, SDLC discipline, Agile execution, code quality, testing strategy, observability, and continuous improvement.
• Communicate technical strategy, tradeoffs, risks, metrics, and execution plans clearly to senior stakeholders and engineering leadership.

Required Qualifications

Education

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical discipline is required.

Experience

• 15+ years of software engineering experience, including significant experience leading tooling, automation, DevOps, build/release engineering, developer productivity, or engineering infrastructure initiatives.
• Demonstrated expertise across the full software development life cycle, including planning, design, implementation, code review, integration, testing, release, deployment, operations, maintenance, and continuous improvement.
• Strong proficiency with Agile development practices, including sprint planning, backlog refinement, estimation, iterative delivery, retrospectives, cross-functional collaboration, and metrics-driven execution.
• Deep experience designing and modernizing CI/CD pipelines, build automation, test automation, release orchestration, deployment workflows, and engineering productivity systems for large-scale software products.
• Hands-on experience with infrastructure automation, configuration management, environment provisioning, artifact management, dependency management, and reproducible build systems.
• Experience establishing quality gates, automated validation, static and dynamic analysis, security scanning, compliance checks, release readiness criteria, and operational monitoring within engineering workflows.
• Strong background in software development using languages such as C++, Python, C#, Java, Go, PowerShell, Bash, or equivalent languages used for product development and engineering automation.
• Experience working with distributed engineering teams and aligning tooling, DevOps, and automation strategy across multiple products, platforms, and stakeholders.
• Practical experience using AI-assisted software development tools such as GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or similar tools to improve coding productivity, code review efficiency, documentation, and engineering workflows.

Technical Skills

• Expert-level proficiency with DevOps toolchains such as Git, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, Team

City, Artifactory, Nexus, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible, or equivalent technologies.

• Strong programming and scripting skills for automation, tooling, and infrastructure integration using Python, PowerShell, Bash, C++, C#, Java, Go, or comparable languages.
• Hands-on experience on Windows and Linux platforms, including build configuration, deployment automation, diagnostics, performance analysis, and cross-platform engineering workflows.
• Strong knowledge of SDLC governance, Agile engineering practices, CI/CD maturity models, release management, branching strategies, code review workflows, automated quality gates, and secure development practices.
• Experience with observability, telemetry, logging, metrics, alerting, reliability engineering, incident analysis, and continuous feedback mechanisms for engineering systems.
• Familiarity with cloud and virtualization platforms such as Azure, AWS, VMware, or equivalent environments used for build, test, deployment, and engineering infrastructure automation.

Soft Skills

• Strong communication and collaboration skills.
• Problem-solving and analytical thinking.
• Ability to work independently and in a team environment.
• Strong organizational and time-management skills.N/A We’re doing work that matters. Help us solve what others can’t.

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