Manager, Software Engineering

At PDF Solutions, we are at the forefront of revolutionizing the semiconductor industry. Our cutting-edge technologies and data-driven solutions empower semiconductor manufacturers to achieve unprecedented levels of efficiency, quality, and innovation. By joining our team, you'll have the opportunity to work with some of the brightest minds in the industry, tackle complex challenges, and contribute to groundbreaking advancements that shape the future of technology. Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, PDF Solutions also operates worldwide in Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan.

This is a specific role with in the Manager, Software Engineering category. We are seeking the manager to lead a forward deployment team who embed directly with semiconductor manufacturing and fabless customers to design, deploy, and iterate on our AI-powered analytics applications. This is a hybrid technical/people leadership role: part software engineering manager, part solutions architect, part customer-facing delivery lead. You will own the translation of LLM-based analytics, agentic workflows, and custom application logic into production tools running against live fab and test data.

The successful candidate will work closely with customers, sales, product management, R&D, applications engineering, and other technical teams to understand customer requirements, develop compelling technical solutions, and drive successful adoption of our products and solutions.

This is an ideal opportunity for a AI and/or semiconductor professional who enjoys solving complex technical problems, working directly with customers, and developing high-performing engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead a software development team with focus on microservice development in .NET/Python
• Responsible of code review, integration testing, development and support of build and deployment pipelines
• Own delivery of custom application builds on top of PDF’s existing platform — from requirements gathering through prototyping, deployment, and hardening for production use
• Translate ambiguous customer problems (yield excursions, test optimization, fab data correlation) into scoped application architectures using LLM-based analytics, agent frameworks, and existing platform APIs
• Partner with Product and core Engineering to identify which customer-driven builds should be generalized into platform features vs. remain bespoke
• Set technical standards for forward-deployed work: code quality, security/data-handling practices at customer sites, versioning, and handoff processes
• Manage the team's engagement model across a global account base — balancing embedded, high-touch engagements with scalable delivery patterns
• Act as the escalation point for technically complex or politically sensitive deployments (data access constraints, IP boundaries, custom vs. core roadmap conflicts)
• Recruit, coach, and develop engineers who can operate independently in ambiguous, customer-facing technical environments
• Report on team capacity, deployment pipeline, and delivery outcomes to senior leadership

• Build trusted relationships with customer engineering and technical leadership.
• Partner closely with Sales and Business Development teams throughout the customer lifecycle.
• Provide technical support during the sales process, including discovery, qualification, technical presentations, demonstrations, proposals, and negotiations.
• Support account planning and strategic customer engagements.

• Master's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Semiconductor Engineering, Physics, Computer Science, or a related technical discipline.
• 7+ years of experience in the semiconductor industry, or 5+ years of experience in a combined environment where AI and semiconductor knowledge are applied (including any period of master degree study).
• 3+ years of people-management or technical leadership experience, or 2+ years of Software development experience or technical R&D thought-leader experience
• Experience in distributed and parallel programming with focus on scalability, resiliency and performance
• Experience building and shipping applications powered by LLMs or agentic frameworks (retrieval, tool-use/agent skills, structured output generation) including prototypes
• Domain familiarity with semiconductor manufacturing, test, or yield analytics — direct experience with fab data, wafer test data, or characterization workflows strongly preferred
• Demonstrated experience in forward-deployed or professional-services-adjacent models: building for one customer while keeping an eye on generalizability
• Strong technical judgment on complexity analysis, data architecture, API design, and integration patterns for enterprise/fab environments
• Strong ability to translate complex technical requirements into practical business and technical solutions.
• Excellent presentation, communication, and customer-facing skills.
• Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional teams and influence stakeholders without direct authority.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, and project management skills.
• Willingness to travel domestically and internationally as required.

CAD $130,000.00 - CAD $180,000.00 /Yr.