Sr Principal/Tech Director – Silicon Validation Engineering

Renesas is looking for a Sr Principal/Technical Director of Silicon Validation Engineering to redefine how automotive‑grade silicon quality is built—driving first‑time‑right silicon, eliminating customer escapes, and setting a new industry benchmark for validation excellence

 Key Responsibilities

• Define and own the end‑to‑end silicon validation strategy for automotive and HPC SoCs, from pre‑silicon enablement through post‑silicon production release.
• Ensure first‑time‑right silicon, robust validation coverage, and zero customer escapes across all assigned programs.
• Lead global validation teams responsible for silicon bring‑up, characterization, and system‑level validation across multiple concurrent programs.
• Establish and drive a System Use Case Validation Program, harvesting real customer/OEM and system scenarios and converting them into automated, traceable validation suites.
• Influence SoC architecture, design, and program decisions through early validation insights, risk identification, and data‑backed recommendations.
• Drive shift‑left validation as a measurable engineering program, increasing reuse across simulation, emulation/FPGA, and silicon to reduce late surprises.
• Own escape‑prevention strategy, including robustness testing, fault scenarios, coverage models, and disciplined validation signoff criteria.
• Build and scale high‑performing validation organizations, developing strong technical leadership (Staff/Principal pipeline) and execution ownership.
• Lead automation, standardization, and infrastructure modernization across validation labs, board farms, and CI systems.
• Establish validation methodologies, quality benchmarks, metrics, and dashboards aligned with Renesas standards and automotive expectations.
• Identify technical, execution, and program risks early; drive data‑driven mitigation and executive decision‑making.
• Provide clear executive‑level reporting on validation status, risks, readiness, and outcomes.
• Act as a trusted partner to Design, DV, Test, Firmware, Software, Product Engineering, Quality, and BU leadership.
• Adoption of industry best practices as a measurable program