How Bose Is Expanding the Reach of Its Technologies to Accelerate Innovation and Growth

How Bose Is Driving Its Platform Transformation

Since its founding in 1964, Bose has been a product-centric organization, known by many for its headphones, speakers, and other audio devices. Those products remain critical to the Bose brand and business. And now, we're expanding where and how we apply our innovation, bringing the technologies behind our products to new partners, categories and experiences beyond traditional Bose products.

As Bose expands where and how it applies its innovation, engineering is evolving alongside it. Chris Olszweski, VP of Systems Engineering, Architecture and Platforms, is helping modernize how Bose develops technology to accelerate innovation, improve engineering efficiency through modern architecture and tooling, and focus investment on the highest-impact growth opportunities.

“Ultimately, our goal is to build a flexible, scalable technology foundation that balances speed, quality, security, and long-term sustainability so we can continuously evolve with the market and apply our technologies across a growing ecosystem,” Olszweski said.

Under Olszweski’s guidance, Bose’s engineering and product teams are driving this transformation, leaning on scaled agile principles and quarterly planning sessions to collaborate and stay aligned, while harnessing technology like AI to move faster than ever before.

Why Bose Is Shifting to Scalable Technology Platforms

Chris Olszweski

VP of Systems Engineering, Architecture and Platforms • Bose

 What are the primary drivers for Bose Corp.’s Platform transformation? What are the early success stories?

At Bose Corp., our platform transformation is about evolving how we develop technology, enabling us to build core capabilities once and deploy them across multiple product categories and businesses. This shift is driven by the need to accelerate innovation, improve engineering efficiency through modern architecture and tooling, and focus investment on the highest-impact growth opportunities. Our platforms include continuous integration and deployment pipelines, which enable new features to swiftly scale from idea to solution across many products. Ultimately, this transformation enables us to move faster, scale our technologies across a growing ecosystem, and unlock new partnership and business models beyond individual products.

How Engineers Contribute to Bose’s Product Roadmap

How does the engineering team directly influence the product roadmap each quarter?

Our operating model utilizes scaled agile principles, which facilitates continuous collaboration between engineering, design, and product management teams. We embrace an adaptability mindset to be able to respond quickly to new business needs while advancing ideas through a structured systems engineering development process. We do quarterly planning across teams through a process and event we call platform increment planning. These events involve balancing priorities between product and engineering needs. It also enables engineering teams to demonstrate their work and suggest new ideas, which are important inputs to the portfolio priorities, which drive the product roadmaps.

“We embrace an adaptability mindset to be able to respond quickly to new business needs while advancing ideas through a structured systems engineering development process.”

How Bose Makes Tech Stack and Architecture Decisions

What guiding principles or decision criteria drive your tech stack choices and architecture updates?

Our technology and architecture decisions are guided by a systems-led approach, starting from end-to-end customer and product requirements, and then shaping the stack to deliver scalable, integrated solutions across hardware, software, and services. We anchor those decisions in clear business value, using consistent evaluation frameworks to prioritize technologies that drive meaningful customer impact and enterprise growth.

A key principle is leveraging the best of both internal innovation and external partner ecosystems, integrating leading partner technologies where they accelerate time to market, while focusing our own investment on areas where Bose Corp. delivers differentiated value or where deeper ownership improves scale and reuse. We also emphasize modularity and simplicity, designing architectures that reduce unnecessary complexity, enable reuse across programs, and support faster iteration. Ultimately, our goal is to build a flexible, scalable technology foundation that balances speed, quality, security, and long-term sustainability so we can continuously evolve with the market and extend our platforms across a growing ecosystem.

How Bose Uses AI to Accelerate Efficiency and Innovation

How does the team stay ahead of emerging technologies like AI or automation?

We have embraced automation in our continuous integration and continuous deployment/delivery pipelines for many years, as it enables rapid and predictable promotion of software while maintaining quality. In addition to industry tools for unit and automated test execution frameworks, we maintain robust labs composed of proprietary hardware-in-the-loop test nodes that continuously exercise new platform software executing on real production-like hardware across a variety of component and system-level performance tests.

The emergence of AI is rapidly changing our developer workflow and CI/CD pipelines. It has already become a core part of test development, code reviews and debugging. The engineering teams are rapidly expanding their use of AI on an almost weekly basis. Each team and developer has their own examples of how AI has improved their work, both in speed and quality. We promote sharing of AI use cases across the company in various communication channels and through demos and knowledge-sharing sessions. Additionally, Bose has a dedicated team which explores emerging AI technologies in the market and manages the deployment of AI capabilities into the enterprise. Lastly, AI is also used as a core tool in our technology development, most notably for noise management technology. We use machine learning to develop audio algorithms, and we run many of those models in our embedded products. Our engineers develop power-efficient models that run on battery-operated products while maintaining outstanding audio performance characteristics.

Help Build the Future of Bose

Bose is transforming how it develops technology—and we're looking for engineers who want to help shape what's next. Whether your passion is AI, embedded software, systems engineering, cloud platforms or architecture, you'll have the opportunity to solve complex technical challenges, influence products used around the world and help build the technology foundation that will power Bose's next generation of innovation. Apply today.

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