What are the responsibilities and job description for the Sr. Multimedia System Architect position at ambiqmicroinc?
Company Overview
Ambiq's mission is to enable intelligence everywhere by delivering the lowest power semiconductor solutions. Ambiq is a pioneer and a leading provider of ultra-low-power semiconductor solutions based on our proprietary and patented sub- and near-threshold technologies. With the increasing power requirements of artificial intelligence (AI) computing, our customers are relying on our solutions to deliver AI to edge environments. Our hardware and software innovations fundamentally deliver a multi-fold improvement in power consumption over traditional semiconductor designs without expensive process geometry scaling. We began in 2010 by addressing the power consumption challenges of battery-powered devices at the edge, where they were most pronounced. As of the beginning of 2025, we've shipped more than 280 million units worldwide.
Our innovative and fast-moving teams of design, research, development, production, marketing, sales, and operations are spread across several continents, including the US (Austin), Taiwan (Hsinchu), China (Shanghai and Shenzhen), and Singapore. We value relentless technology innovation, a deep commitment to customer success, collaborative problem-solving, and an enthusiastic pursuit of energy efficiency. We embrace candidates who also share these same values. The successful candidate must be self-motivated, creative, and comfortable learning and driving exciting new technologies. We encourage and nurture an environment that fosters growth and opportunities to work on complex, meaningful, and challenging projects, creating a lasting impact and shaping the future of technology. Join us on our quest for enabling billions of intelligent devices. The intelligence everywhere revolution starts here.
This role will be on-site 5 days a week in NW Austin.
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
Specific Responsibilities
As the Sr Multimedia System Architect at Ambiq, you will drive the architecture definition of various aspects of Ambiq’s low-power SoC’s with a specific focus on multimedia technologies, including graphics, display, video, imaging and AI.
This is a critical function at Ambiq to support delivering the world’s lowest power electronic devices to enable 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 architecture specification, low-level microarchitecture, process node-dependent analysis, power/performance modeling, analysis, and use case definition.
- Architecture specifications including flow diagrams/sequences, power/performance models, and pseudocode
- Customer interaction as 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 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
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, 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)
What You Need
We're seeking passionate technologists who thrive on pushing boundaries, solving complex challenges, and driving transformative solutions.
At Ambiq, you'll collaborate with a dynamic team that values relentless innovation, customer-centric thinking, and continuous learning. If you're a self-motivated, creative problem-solver eager to push technological limits and make a meaningful impact in energy efficiency, this is your opportunity to grow, excel, and turn groundbreaking ideas into reality.
Most importantly, the successful candidate will be able to live the Ambiq Shared Values:
- Innovate: We tenaciously find ways to break down the barriers to possible solutions
- Collaborate: We proactively communicate and encourage each other to be better.
- Focus: We keep the voice of the customer at the center of everything we do.
- Learn: We strive for continuous improvement and are always curious.
- Achieve: We execute on quality and follow through on our commitments.