How Cadence Design Systems Pays

Technical ladder — E1 through E7

Management ladder — first-line manager and director

Disclosed executive layer

Track divergence

Hierarchy qualifications and legacy structures

• Cadence exposes titles and requisitions but never a global numeric grade system, so the E and M labels here must not be quoted back as internal codes in a negotiation.
• The one legacy structure that is publicly traceable concerns equity plans, not salary grades: the 1997 plan merged into the 2000 plan, the 2000 plan consolidated into the 1987 plan, and the 1987 plan was restated as the Omnibus Plan in 2014.
• The crosswalk is most reliable for software and design engineering, where public records name the exact title. It degrades for application engineering, sales, marketing and corporate functions, where Cadence can place equivalent scope very differently.
• Distinguished Engineer, Cadence Fellow and Chief Architect sit above E7 on the technical ladder, and the bundle carries no pay evidence for them. Extrapolating from the E7 numbers is explicitly warned against in the source research.
• Corporate Vice President and Vice President exist as real layers between director and the named executive tier, but no public source discloses standardised pay for either, so neither appears as a band row here.
• The February 2026 Hexagon Design and Engineering acquisition added a substantial engineering workforce whose grade and pay harmonisation framework has not been published, so acquired-population titles may not map onto this ladder at all.

Peer-level mapping

Office and market catalogue — calibration factors versus San Jose

Cadence's public office directory also lists sites this table does not price, because the bundle found no compensation evidence for them at all: Munich and Feldkirchen, Paris, Sophia Antipolis and Grenoble, Milan, Barcelona, Dublin and Cork, Warsaw, Leuven, Prague, Stockholm, Tel Aviv and Petah Tikva, Shanghai, Beijing and Nanjing, Tokyo and Yokohama, Seoul, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur and Penang. They are real offices with no public pay table, and inventing a factor for them would be a fabrication rather than a model.

San Jose anchor medians — the basis of every modeled cell

• San Jose is the anchor column. The E1 through E7 medians are United States-wide employee-reported software engineering records rather than San Jose-only figures, because Cadence's public pay evidence is nationwide.
• Only two United States cities carry an independent wage aggregate: Austin at a $139,630 visa median and Burlington at $151,226, against $154,359 for San Jose. Those ratios set the Austin and Chelmsford factors; every other United States city is held at the nationwide proxy because no city differential is public.
• India total compensation runs at roughly 13 percent of the anchor at Software Engineer I and rises towards 47 percent at Software Architect. The multiple falls from about 7.8 times at entry to about 2.1 times at architect, driven almost entirely by the Indian equity component.
• The Noida and Greater Noida sample is the only city-level Indian evidence: Software Engineer I total at 1,660,637 rupees and a highest reported Senior Principal package of 8,335,314 rupees. Both sit within about 2 percent of the India-wide figures, so no separate Noida factor is warranted.
• Taiwan is calibrated on three matched levels, Canada on two and the United Kingdom on two. Sydney rests on two Glassdoor submissions mapped analytically to the Principal cohort, which is the weakest evidence in the table.
• Executive rows are deliberately absent from the band table. The chief executive and named executive figures are single global proxy disclosures, and interpolating city factors through them would put an Indian or Taiwanese cell on a United States executive base.

Executive incentive targets — percent of salary

Named-executive outcomes

• A simple pre-amendment snapshot ratio of outstanding options plus unvested awards to those instruments plus available Omnibus shares is about 40.3 percent. That is a capacity measure, not an official utilisation rate: it excludes already issued and vested shares, cancellations, award fungibility and everything that happened after 19 February 2026.
• 994,747 options were still outstanding at 31 December 2025 at a $193.12 weighted-average exercise price. Options are a live instrument at Cadence in a way they are not at several software peers, and the FY2025 option expense was $16.101 million.
• 6,154,415 unvested incentive stock awards and restricted stock units were outstanding at 31 December 2025.
• The May 2026 amendment also removed the plan's fixed 2030 term, which extends the runway for future grants beyond the added 5,000,000 shares.
• The precise current pool utilisation is not publicly disclosed, and any figure derived from the February 2026 snapshot is stale by the report date.

Equity plan capacity and grant activity

Vesting — common reported employee schedule

The schedule shown is the disclosed standard executive restricted stock unit pattern: one third at approximately twelve months, then four equal semi-annual instalments across the following two years. Financial performance stock units use a one-year measurement with earned units generally vesting in thirds over three years, relative shareholder-return units run one, two and three-year performance periods, and the chief executive and named executive long-term performance awards carry multi-year shareholder-return hurdles plus continued service. No standard non-executive vesting policy by level is published, though employee reports commonly describe three-year and four-year patterns.

Eligibility by hierarchy level

• Broad-based is an aggregate programme description, not a promise. Cadence discloses no minimum eligible level, no standard grant matrix and no guarantee that any individual employee receives a direct award.
• Reported annualised stock value rises steeply with level in the United States sample: $3,000 at Software Engineer I, $13,073 at Lead, $26,444 at Principal, $68,000 at Architect and $73,889 at Senior Architect.
• Zero equity appears in one Indian and one Canadian entry-level median. A single zero-stock sample is not proof of ineligibility, but it does show that a grant is not automatic at the junior levels outside the United States.
• Distinguished Engineer and Fellow eligibility is plausible but no standard amount is disclosed, and the source research warns explicitly against extrapolating the Senior Architect figure upward.
• Reported annualised stock value is not the face value of a new grant. It reflects overlapping vesting cohorts and share-price movement, so it will diverge from what a new offer letter shows.
• The employee stock purchase plan is the one equity component an employee can size themselves, up to 15 percent of pay and the $25,000 United States statutory cap.

Indicative annual grant value by band — San Jose

Annualized planning value (±25%), not the face value of every new-hire grant. Share equivalents use the $331.9 reference price at 25 August 2026 Nasdaq close and ignore plan valuation rules and PSU performance. Highlighted rows are disclosed grant-date stock awards.

Named executive target equity

The four non-chief-executive named officers cluster tightly, from $15,185,652 to $17,119,862, and the two group general managers received identical $14,071,174 stock grants, which suggests a group-level equity band even though none is published. Base salaries run from $500,000 to $600,000 against the chief executive's $800,000, so the cash spread across the executive tier is narrow and the equity spread is what differentiates. Each named executive received a $10,500 United States 401(k) match in FY2025, which is essentially all of their all-other-compensation line.

Board compensation framework

The director programme is a governance package, not an employment band, and it is excluded from the band table and the range chart. It is worth reading alongside the employee data for one reason: a non-employee director's $320,000 standard package sits above the observed Software Architect total of $304,972 for a part-time role, which is a useful calibration of how Cadence prices scarce technical talent against board oversight.

Not publicly disclosed

Modeled promotion planning timeline

Two timing facts are confirmed and worth planning around. Executive base salaries are reviewed annually, generally in the first quarter, and the employee bonus program is semi-annual rather than annual, which means half of a year's variable pay settles mid-year. Everything else about the calendar, including when broad employee increases take effect, is absent from public disclosure.

Dataset summary

City-level H-1B wage history

All-years aggregates. P25/P75 are rounded reconstruction values marked modeled; medians and record counts are the stronger fields.

Selected title / worksite records

Evidence classification

Explicit “Not publicly disclosed” index

Known gaps and diligence before relying on a cell

1. 1Executive rows are deliberately excluded from the band table. The chief executive, named executive and board figures are single global proxy disclosures, and letting them anchor the top of the location interpolation would put an Indian or Taiwanese cell on a United States executive base. They are carried in the executive section instead, so the band table stops at the director row and covers nine levels rather than a full ladder.
2. 2Distinguished Engineer, Fellow, Corporate Vice President and Vice President have no public pay evidence of any kind, so no band row exists for them even though all four are real layers between the director row and the named executive tier.
3. 3The manager and director rows carry only one disclosed component each: a $278,000 reported total for the manager and a $178,500 to $331,500 employer-posted base range for the director. Their bonus and equity components are modelled on the adjacent technical levels and should be treated as a planning envelope.
4. 4The two visa aggregators disagree on FY2025 volume, 282 certified applications from Ellis against 310 from MyVisaJobs, and on the median wage, $132,683 against H1BGrader's $153,493 FY2026 view. Neither is traceable to a government filing in this bundle, so both are shown with their own definitions rather than reconciled.
5. 5Nineteen Cadence offices across continental Europe, Israel, China, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Malaysia are omitted from the location table because the bundle found no compensation evidence for them. They are named in the office note. Inventing a factor to include them would have been a fabrication rather than a model.
6. 6United States cities other than Austin and Chelmsford are held at the nationwide anchor because the underlying salary records are United States-wide rather than city-level. San Jose is the labelled anchor, so a San Jose cell is really a United States median and will understate the true Bay Area premium.
7. 7Total compensation is rebuilt strictly as base plus bonus plus annualised stock. No notional employer benefit load, Provident Fund contribution or superannuation guarantee is added anywhere, because those are employer cost rather than pay.
8. 8The India Principal row has a disclosed total of 5,181,887 rupees with no component split, so the Indian base and total factors are fitted across five levels rather than six.
9. 9Australia rests on two Glassdoor submissions mapped analytically to the Principal cohort, and carries flat factors because a single observed cohort cannot evidence level-dependent compression.
10. 10No fiscal-year-end date is stated in the bundle beyond the 10-K covering the period ended 31 December 2025, and no founding year is given, so neither is asserted beyond what the filings support.

FX rates used — 1 USD equals, snapshot 2026-08-25

Single-date conversion layer for comparability; it ignores payroll-date FX, tax, purchasing power, benefits valuation and hedging. Compensation intelligence, not legal, tax, investment, immigration or employment advice.

Source register — 35 sources

Headcount has grown at roughly 10 to 13 percent a year and has added about 3,600 people since 2022, faster than the roughly 2 percent a year typical of mature large-cap software. Only the 2025 figure comes from a filing; the earlier three are secondary compilations. Cadence publishes no attrition series and no headcount by country or city, and the February 2026 Hexagon Design and Engineering acquisition adds a further engineering population that will not be visible as a separate line in any disclosure.