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 290 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. Must have the right to work in the US without visa sponsorship now or in the future.
Scope
As the Software Architect at Ambiq, you will drive the software architecture and requirements for our latest family of low-power Edge AI MCUs. As a Software Architect, you will be working closely with our SoC hardware architects, product marketing, and our IP vendors to develop solid functional allocations and requirements for our software development and system test teams. The role will cover the areas of multi-processor communications, data movement acceleration, virtual memory management, dynamic resource allocation, power optimization, and debug tools. You will be embedded into Ambiq’s software development teams as the subject matter expert for the duration of the product development.
The successful candidate will have extensive experience in the early-stage software development process. The candidate must have strong experience in embedded software programming on ARM Cortex-M processors using RTOS. They must be familiar with methods for functional allocation, requirements traceability, Software Requirement Specification content, and make vs. buy analysis for commercial and open-source software.
Responsibilities
- Requirements analysis based on disparate and preliminary information from SoC hardware architecture team, product marketing, other software architects, and software development teams resulting in contributions to a software requirements specification for the device. This should include any software prototyping required to refine the architectural understanding and requirements.
- Working closely with our field, product marketing, and system test teams to understand our Alpha customer use cases and their impact on requirements and testability.
- Engaging during the software implementation and test phases to review designs, test plans, code, and test case results as a SME for certain aspects of the SoC software architecture.
- Support performance and power optimization of the areas for which you are responsible.
- Define and enforce architectural standards, guidelines, and best practices.
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to align architectural decisions with overall business objectives.
- Diagnose and resolve complex technical issues and recommend trade-offs between software and hardware implementations.
- Collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams to achieve project goals.
- Mentor and guide junior team members.
Qualifications
- A Bachelor's of Science or Master's in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or Computer Science.
- 12+ years of experience developing embedded software for real-time environments (bare metal and RTOS).
- Experienced in code development in C/C++ and assembly language for embedded targets using ARM Cortex-M processors.
- Experience in writing software requirements specifications with an eye towards customer use cases, derived software requirements, and testability on FPGA-based emulation platforms, as well as full system reference designs.
- Experience with asymmetric multicore systems and control/data plane interaction, including inter-processor communication via remote processor messaging frameworks (e.g., OpenAMP or RPMsg).
- Experience with general-purpose data movement engines, memory management units, memory protection, L1/L2 caches, shared memories, and dual-port memories.
- Experience in power optimization for embedded systems is desirable. Familiarity with voltage and frequency scaling, clock gating, sleep/wake cycles, and low-power modes of processors and peripherals.
- Familiarity with at least one MCU IDE on Windows from ARM/Keil, IAR, Eclipse, or others.
- Familiarity with Trust Zone for M-Class microcontrollers and/or Trusted Firmware for microcontrollers is preferred.
- Experience with Graphics, Display and Audio/Video processing in embedded systems preferred.
- The candidate must be able to independently manage assigned tasks, prioritize workload, and meet deadlines with minimal supervision. Proactive problem-solving skills and the ability to seek clarification when needed are essential.
What We Do
Ambiq makes unprecedented energy-efficient SoCs and ultra-low power platform solutions that enable edge AI on billions of battery-powered devices. Our mission is to put intelligence everywhere by delivering the lowest-power semiconductor solutions on the planet. With SPOT® technology and the Apollo SoC family, Ambiq empowers innovators to build smarter, longer-lasting wearables, IoT, smart home, healthcare, and industrial devices. Ambiq has helped leading manufacturers worldwide develop products that last weeks on a single charge (rather than days) while delivering a maximum feature set in compact industrial designs. Ambiq's goal is to take Artificial Intelligence (AI) where it has never gone before in mobile and portable devices, using Ambiq's advanced ultra-low power system on chip (SoC) solutions. Ambiq has shipped more than 200 million units as of March 2023. The next generation of AI will not depend on constant cloud connectivity. It will run directly on ultra-low-power silicon in wearables, sensors, and embedded systems. At Ambiq, we design and ship production silicon that enables: Real-time inference on constrained devices Models optimized to run in tens of KB Extreme power efficiency for battery-operated systems Deep hardware/software co-design This is not research. It’s deployed technology.
Why Work With Us
Direct influence on silicon architecture Smaller, high-impact teams Hardware/software co-design in real time Faster technical decision cycles Visible ownership at Staff & Director level Austin-based collaboration culture
