Sr. Multimedia SOC System Architect

This role will be on-site 5 days a week in NW Austin.

Scope  

This role will be on-site 5 days a week in NW Austin. 

As the Sr Multimedia System Architect at Ambiq, you will drive the architectural definition of various aspects of Ambiq’s low-power SoCs, with a specific focus on multimedia technologies, including graphics, display, video, imaging, and AI. 

This is a critical function at Ambiq that supports the delivery of the world’s lowest-power electronic devices, enabling ubiquitous AI at the edge. This is a cross-functional position working with software and hardware engineering teams, applications engineering, and field teams to ensure alignment to product requirements, logical and physical design constraints, power and performance targets, and overall system architecture. This role will encompass high-level architectural specification, low-level microarchitecture, process-node-dependent analysis, power/performance modeling, and use-case definition. 

Specific Responsibilities 

• Architecture specifications, including flow diagrams/sequences, power/performance models, and pseudocode 
• Customer interaction is needed to ensure alignment on key multimedia features and competitive product positioning  
• Microarchitecture specifications (as applicable) and support to enable software and hardware design 
• Support for use case and test case development 
• Integration specifications to support system interfaces and external power management requirements/interfaces 
• Work with the FPGA team to bring up critical multimedia features 
• Work with software architecture to define multimedia flows, APIs, and hardware abstraction layers 
• Work with the physical design team to ensure robust/optimal implementation 
• Work with the design team to debug issues using RTL and gate-level simulation 

Expectations for a successful candidate are as follows: 

• Work with Ambiq’s Marketing, Advanced Development, architecture, and engineering teams to drive development of new ultra-low power multimedia architectures on Ambiq Micro’s technology and product roadmaps 
• Develop high-level specifications and drive power/performance modeling and analysis 
• Analyze low-power multimedia technology and applications to identify opportunities for extending Ambiq’s low-power leadership 
• Define Ambiq’s multimedia and AI technology roadmap, including external and internal IP assessment, definition, and integration 
• Work with the engineering teams to transition the architecture specification into Ambiq Micro’s products 
• Work with systems, solutions, and software teams to ensure robust interfaces and support key product use cases 
• Support post-silicon analysis and efficient delivery of multimedia functionality to customers for mass production 

Requirements 

The candidate should be comfortable with independent specification, analysis, and development from high-level concepts through design and validation, as well as collaborative development with software and hardware engineering. A deep knowledge of graphics accelerators, graphics processing, display controllers and panel interfaces, image signal processors, video encoding/decoding, image sensors, or neural network accelerators specifically targeting wearable, IoT and mobile systems are critical, along with specific experience delivering low-power architectures to market. A working knowledge of SoC architecture, fabric/interconnect technologies, power management, and advanced process nodes is preferred. The candidate should be comfortable with complete system dataflows and modeling to guide hardware and software analysis and development. 

Specific Experience 

• Minimum of 8 years of graphics, display, video, imaging or neural networks or similar architecture and design experience targeting wearable/IoT and mobile products 
• Experience developing novel multimedia architectures from idea to specification to design to post-silicon validation 
• Working knowledge of low-power modern mobile consumer electronic systems and embedded graphics, imaging or neural network processing required 
• Experience in embedded display technologies and low-power interfaces required 
• Experience in advanced process technologies is highly desirable 
• BS in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering or Computer Science (must have) 
• MS or PhD (preferred) 
• Individual contributor role, but some management/team lead experience is nice-to-have 
• Must have experience creating architectural specifications for System-on-Chip or similar complex hardware devices 
• Must communicate well (verbal and written) 

Must be currently authorized to work in the United States for any employer. We do not sponsor or take over sponsorship of employment visas (now or in the future) for this role.