System Architect, Hardware Architecture

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.

Key job responsibilities

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.

A day in the life

• 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.

About the team

The system architecture team is responsible for architecting Amazon Lab126 products including Echo, Fire Tablets, FireTV, Kindle eReaders, Hearables, Wearables and IoT. The team also owns the chipset and IP technology roadmap and drives strategies that enable reuse and scale across Amazon devices. The team is comprised of architects with varied hardware and software backgrounds. We are always on the lookout for capable architects who can raise the bar and add technical expertise and depth to drive architectures for next-gen devices and emerging concepts.

Come be a part of the system architecture team in Lab126 Hardware Architecture and technology! Employees who have experience with consumer electronics devices and have been EEs, embedded software engineers, systems engineers, etc. and would like to contribute at the architecture level to the exciting Lab126 roadmap are encouraged to apply.