System Architect, Hardware Architecture

Amazon • Sunnyvale, CA

2d

About The Position

The Amazon Devices team designs high-profile consumer electronics, including the
best-selling Amazon Echo, FireTV, Fire Tablets, Kindle, and Astro family of
products. We are looking for a motivated individual contributor with a solid
hardware or silicon background, great communication skills, and the passion to
collaborate with a cross-functional team to drive system architecture across
Amazon devices.

As a System Architect, you will be responsible for defining the system
architecture for consumer products such as Echo, FireTV and a range of new
concepts not yet announced. You will serve as the lead technical point of
contact that the product management and business teams rely on to interpret and
clarify the product concept's desired user experience and requirements. You will
define system architecture that can meet product requirements and work closely
with the business team to understand and clarify requirements and user
experience tradeoffs. In the process of architecture definition, you will drive
key design decisions such as edge-cloud compute partition, device SoC selection,
compute architecture (CPU, DSP, GPU and ML accelerators), and other system
component selections (chipsets, memory, storage). You will document the
decisions in a system architecture specification document that will provide
relevant design guidance for the engineering team.

Besides directly defining product architectures, you will track market trends,
interface directly with silicon and IP vendors, and define roadmaps for the
whole organization on the next generation compute IP and silicon platforms. You
will dive deep into silicon design, define specs for the next-gen silicon
platforms and work with our silicon suppliers to implement them. You will work
on concepts that may have an existing reference architecture as well as emerging
product ideas that do not have any precedence. As the product is developed from
the initial concept, prototype development, validation, to production you will
stay engaged as the system technical lead to ensure the product requirements are
being met. Throughout this process you work closely with multi-disciplinary
product team including Program Management, Electrical Engineering, Software
Engineering, ML Science, Product Design, Industrial Design, Reliability, and
Operations.

You are a hands-on engineer who is close to the details and validates your
architecture assumptions through profiling and benchmarking. You have sufficient
breadth across system domains to be able to independently lead a
cross-functional group to drive architecture decisions. Besides breadth, you
also typically bring depth in one or more areas of expertise to the architecture
team, such as computer architecture, SoC architecture, silicon design, graphics
and multimedia, embedded Linux, video encoders/decoders, applied machine
learning, ML accelerators, audio, wireless, sensors, power management, system
performance benchmarking, etc. As part of technology development, you contribute
towards developing IP and filing patents.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering or a related field
• Experience identifying bugs in architecture, algorithms, functionality, and performance with strong overall debugging skills
• Experience verifying at multiple levels of logic from IP blocks to SoCs to full system testing

Nice To Haves

• Master's degree in Electrical or Communications Engineering or a related field
• Experience with formal verification techniques including abstraction and end-to-end checking
• Experience with ARM and various DSP ISAs
• Experience with current and upcoming RF standards in cellular (4G/5G NR), WiMAX, 802.11ad, microwave backhaul, or related broadband wireless standards
• Experience with industry standard tools and scripting languages (Python or Perl) for automation

Responsibilities

• Gather business and functional product requirements from external/internal customers, and translate these requirements into technical specifications and architectures that are robust, scalable and supportable
• Perform architecture feasibility analysis, including profiling, benchmarking and prototyping new features (with the larger team) on available silicon platforms.
• Present architecture tradeoffs and recommendations to senior management (VP level)
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to develop and document architecture specifications that serve as a reference for development teams
• Serve as a technical lead throughout the full development lifecycle, end-to-end, from scoping, planning, conception, design, implementation and testing, to delivery and maintenance
• Provide design and validation reviews for other engineers, including feedback on architecture and design issues, as well as integration, performance and scalability.
• Drive technology roadmaps in areas of expertise to foster innovation and meet the needs of the long-term product roadmap.
• Work closely with silicon and component suppliers and influence their roadmaps to meet Amazon Lab126 needs.

Benefits

• health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage)
• 401(k) matching
• paid time off
• parental leave

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level