Product Architectural Model Development Leader

Position Summary

Altera is seeking a Product Architecture
Model Development Leader to drive the creation, quality, and evolution of behavioral and architectural models that represent next-generation FPGA silicon before and during RTL development.

This role sits at the intersection of architecture, verification, software enablement, and customer enablement - the behavioral models you and your team build become the single source of truth used by architects for pathfinding and performance analysis, by verification teams for golden-reference checking, by RTL design teams as an internal product reference for intended behavior, and by software/compiler teams for early enablement, long before silicon or even RTL exists.

These models will also enable customers earlier in the product lifecycle through pre-silicon functional simulation, early RTL and data-flow development, and software and driver development ahead of device availability.

You will lead a team of model developers and set the technical direction for how Altera represents FPGA fabric, hard IP, and system-level behavior in executable, simulatable form.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership

• Lead a team of behavioral modeling engineers responsible for developing cycle-approximate and functional models of FPGA architecture (fabric, DSP blocks, memory hierarchies, hard IP, transceivers, NoC, etc.)
• Define modeling methodology, coding standards, and architecture for behavioral models (C++, SystemC, Python) used across the pre-silicon design flow
• Own the roadmap for model development in lockstep with architecture definition milestones - from early concept and pathfinding through RTL freeze
• Drive model accuracy, performance, and maintainability trade-offs, ensuring models scale across increasingly complex FPGA generations

Cross-Functional Model Ownership

• Partner with silicon architects to translate architectural specifications and microarchitecture decisions into executable behavioral models
• Establish the architectural model as a trusted internal product reference for intended system behavior, functional flows, interfaces, and architectural rules across architecture, design, verification, firmware, and software teams
• Collaborate with verification teams to ensure behavioral models serve as golden references / scoreboards for RTL verification (UVM environments, formal checking, co-simulation)
• Work with performance modeling and pathfinding teams to support design-space exploration, power/performance/area (PPA) trade-off studies, and early customer workload analysis
• Drive early customer enablement by delivering models that support pre-silicon prototyping, functional simulation, RTL and data-flow development, and evaluation of product capabilities before silicon availability
• Support software, firmware, compiler, driver, and tools teams that depend on behavioral models for early development, platform bring-up, and functional simulation ahead of silicon availability
• Work with Quartus and customer-facing engineering teams to evolve models into early product representations that allow customers and FAEs to begin development sooner and reduce time to first successful design on new devices
• Interface with RTL design teams to resolve model-vs-RTL discrepancies and maintain model/RTL equivalence throughout the design cycle

Process and Infrastructure

• Establish and maintain simulation infrastructure, regression frameworks, and CI pipelines for model validation
• Drive model versioning, documentation, and configuration management practices so models remain a trusted reference across multiple concurrent projects/generations
• Champion automation to reduce hand-off latency between architecture spec, model, RTL, and verification
• Identify…