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.
As the Staff Embedded Software Engineer, MCU Software at Ambiq, you will drive the development and testing of core MCU functions in AmbiqSuite SDK on Ambiq SoC devices and emulation platforms. These include features like data movement (DMA), neural processing unit (NPU), and general MCU management. You will also be contributing to defining and implementing the multicore software framework and related infrastructure.
This role will work within our global MCU software development team, closely with the architecture team and the local MCU SoC design team, focusing on MCU software development and testing.
A successful candidate should be a fast learner, results-driven, and self-motivated team player with an “always learning” mindset. They should have an inquiring spirit and be comfortable in a lab environment and in executing hands-on debugging for embedded systems.
The person in this role will be responsible for extending the hardware adaptation layer (HAL) and device drivers of the SDK to new platforms as well as enhancing its features and content, with a focus on memory management and data movement subsystems. The candidate will be involved in extending the SDK to support new MCU family members as they become available.
Responsibilities- Lead the design, development, and maintenance of the HAL interfaces for Neural Processing Unit (NPU) and Data Movement Engine (DME) subsystems, as well as other general MCU management.
- Design, develop, and maintain examples and software test cases for these blocks.
- Take a key role in the pre-silicon verification on FPGA, as well as post-silicon bring up, verification, performance optimization, and debug, focusing on these blocks.
- Design, develop, and maintain real-time OS ports for Ambiq MCUs.
- Support design verification (DV) and validation engineers, field engineers, and key customers as needed.
- MS in ECE or Computer Science and 6+ years of experience, or BS ECE/CS with 8+ years of experience, with at least 3 years focusing on NPU and DMA, or related subsystems;
- Deep understanding of ARM architectures, M-profile preferred;
- Experience with the low-level usage of ARM Ethos NPU including support of the ARM provided drivers, utilities and toolchains. Performance characterization of the NPU on real-world embedded ML models is a real plus.
- Solid experience with DMA engines, chained and scatter/gather transfers. Hands-on experience profiling and optimizing memory access patterns, DMA throughput, and cache usage;
- Experience with memory protection, isolation, and secure DMA for trusted execution environments is a plus.
- Experience working with multicore embedded processing systems is preferred.
- Deep understanding of embedded RTOS required, Zephyr and FreeRTOS preferred;
- Experience with developing embedded MCU code in C and assembly language on Arm Cortex-M Processors;
- Experience with at least one MCU IDE from ARM, Keil, IAR, Eclipse, Ozone or other;
- Good hands-on experience on lab equipment such as oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, etc., for debugging issues;
- Experience with Jira, Confluence, and collaboration tools;
- Experience with source code control systems (git) required;
- Understanding of software testing and test automation principles;
- Excellent problem-solving skills dealing with complex system-level issues related to HW/SW debug;
- Experience with scripting languages is required, and Python experience is specifically desirable.
- Strong communication and documentation skills.
**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.
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
