Senior Director - System Architecture

Company Overview

Ambiq is on a mission to enable intelligence everywhere - powering the AI edge revolution with the world's lowest-power semiconductor solutions.

Built on our proprietary sub- and near-threshold technology, our chips deliver multi-fold improvements in energy efficiency without costly process scaling. Since 2010, we've shipped over 300 million units to customers building smarter wearables, medical devices, IoT products, and AI-powered edge applications.

Our cross-functional teams span design, research, development, production, marketing, sales, and operations across Austin, Hsinchu, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Singapore. We move fast, tackle hard problems, and create space for people to grow through complex, meaningful work that shapes the future of technology.

We're looking for self-motivated, creative problem-solvers who are eager to push technological limits and make a real impact in energy efficiency.

At Ambiq, we live by five values: Innovate. Collaborate. Focus. Learn. Achieve.

If that's you, join us - the intelligence everywhere revolution starts here.

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

Scope

The Sr Director of System Architecture will serve as the lead architect, developing next-generation ultra-low-power, AI-based SoC architectures for future Ambiq products. The candidate will own the development and coordination of new product architectures with the Marketing, Advanced Development, and Engineering teams. This position will report directly to the VP of Architecture. Areas of interest include: low-power embedded microprocessor and microcontroller-based System on Chip (SoC), interconnect technologies, memory technologies and topologies, clocking, power management, as well as preferred familiarity with 2D and 3D graphics accelerators and display controller technologies, video and image processing, and Neural Network processors/accelerators/NPUs. The candidate will have sufficient experience with system-level design, hardware/software partitioning, power, and performance modeling/tradeoffs.

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 AI System on Chip (SoC) architectures on Ambiq Micro’s technology and product roadmaps
• Develop high-level specifications and drive power/performance modeling and analysis
• Analyze low-power interconnect, memory and hardware accelerator technologies and applications to identify opportunities for extending Ambiq’s low-power leadership
• Support the definition of Ambiq’s 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 Ambiq products to customers for mass production

Specific Responsibilities

As the Sr Director of System Architecture at Ambiq, you will lead the architecture definition of various Ambiq low-power AI SoCs from initial concept to mass production.

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.

• Architecture specifications, including flow diagrams/sequences, power/performance models and pseudocode
• Customer interaction as needed to ensure alignment on key 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 bringup critical SoC features
• Work with software architecture to define flows, APIs and hardware abstraction layers
• Work with physical design team to ensure robust/optimal implementation
• Work with design team to debug issues using RTL and gate level simulation

Education and Experience:

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 embedded systems and microprocessor/microcontroller-based AI System on Chip (SoC) specifically targeting wearable, IoT, and mobile systems is 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 required. Additionally, experience with wireless technologies and SoCs specifically Bluetooth, WiFi, NFC and GPS is preferred. The candidate should be comfortable with full system dataflows and modeling to guide hardware and software analysis and development.

Specific Experience

• Minimum of 15 years of microprocessor/microcontroller-based System on Chip or similar architecture and design experience targeting wearable/IoT and mobile products
• Experience developing novel low-power architectures from idea to specification to design to post-silicon validation
• Working knowledge of low-power modern mobile consumer electronic systems required
• Experience in advanced process node technologies highly desirable
• BS in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering or Computer Science (must have)
• MS or PhD (strongly preferred)
• Individual contributor role but strong technical and team leadership experience is desired.
• 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.