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Cadence

Large Enterprises

Cadence Design Systems is a leading provider of electronic design automation (EDA) software, hardware, and intellectual property used to design integrated circuits and electronic systems. The company is known for its tools that help semiconductor and electronics companies develop chips and system-on-chip products.

4 interview notes · updated Jul 2026

Cadence·AI Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Tech screen for an AI Engineer role at Cadence. Pretty standard behavioral opener followed by a deep dive into two resume projects, one focused on impact and one matched to the job description. The follow-ups were where it got real.
  • Walk me through a project where you solved a meaningful problem. What was the use case and what impact did it have?
  • Pick a project from your resume that's most relevant to this role and walk me through the tech stack and key technical decisions.

“This is the kind of question that sounds easy until you're actually in it and realize you've been rambling about implementation for two minutes without ever saying what the problem was.”

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Cadence·AI Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Live coding round at Cadence for an AI Engineer role, one problem, graph traversal. Pretty standard stuff but they pushed on implementation details more than I expected.
  • Given an undirected graph with n nodes labeled 0 through n-1 and a list of edges, write a function to count the number of connected components.

“Built the adjacency list first, then looped through unvisited nodes and ran DFS from each one, incrementing a counter per traversal.”

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Cadence·AI Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Interviewed for an AI Engineer role at Cadence and got hit with a deep-dive on positional encoding. One question, but it had a lot of surface area and I wasn't fully prepared for how far they'd push on the modern variants.
  • Explain positional encoding in Transformers: why it's necessary, how the original sinusoidal approach works, what modern alternatives exist, and how these choices affect a model's ability to handle longer contexts than it was trained on.

“I started okay on the 'why' part.”

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Cadence·Software Engineer·Hiring Manager Screen

Mar 2025
Had a technical chat with the hiring manager at Cadence for an ML Software Engineer role. It was mostly a resume walkthrough plus some LLM breadth questions around fine-tuning and quantization. The timeline was a bit awkward since they wanted someone in April and I don't graduate until August, but I offered to start early. Heard nothing for a few weeks, then got an email to continue the process.
  • Walk me through your resume and relevant experience.
  • What do you know about fine-tuning large language models?
  • Can you explain quantization and how it applies to LLMs?

“Pretty standard opener.”

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