Firmware Engineer, Annapurna Labs, ML Acceleration - Performance Instrumentation & Developer Tools

Firmware Engineer, Annapurna Labs, ML Acceleration – Performance Instrumentation & Developer Tools

AWS Utility Computing (UC) provides product Annapurna Labs for designing silicon and software that accelerates innovation. Our custom chips, accelerators, and software stacks enable us to take on technical challenges that have never been seen before and deliver results that help our customers change the world.

We are seeking a Senior Firmware Engineer to join our Power Architecture team, developing firmware algorithms for power and performance management on ML Acceleration chips. In this role you will design and implement intelligent control algorithms, optimization strategies, and real‑time decision‑making systems that maximize performance while managing power and thermal constraints.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement firmware algorithms for power management, thermal control, and performance optimization on ML acceleration hardware.
• Develop real‑time control policies and state machines that dynamically balance power, thermal, and performance constraints.
• Create optimization algorithms for resource allocation, frequency/voltage scaling, and workload scheduling.
• Implement efficient data structures and algorithms suitable for embedded, resource‑constrained environments.
• Design and implement on‑device tracing and telemetry collection systems to support algorithm development and validation.
• Build developer tools and data pipelines for metric collection, analysis, and visualization of algorithm behavior.
• Implement low‑overhead instrumentation that minimizes impact on workload performance.
• Collaborate with hardware architects to understand hardware capabilities and identify optimal instrumentation points.
• Develop automated testing and validation workflows; integrate with optional cloud‑based analytics pipelines.
• Own firmware code quality through rigorous testing, debugging, and validation on hardware.

Basic Qualifications

• 3+ years of non‑internship professional software development experience.
• 2+ years of non‑internship design or architecture experience for new and existing systems.
• Experience programming with at least one software programming language.
• Strong firmware or embedded systems development experience.
• Proficiency in C/C++ for systems programming with strong fundamentals in algorithms and data structures.
• Experience implementing efficient algorithms in resource‑constrained, real‑time environments.
• Experience with hardware interfaces, instrumentation, or performance monitoring.
• Strong debugging skills with hardware‑software systems.
• Experience building developer tools or instrumentation frameworks.

Preferred Qualifications

• 3+ years of full software development life cycle experience, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or equivalent.
• Experience developing control algorithms, optimization algorithms, or state machines in firmware.
• Experience with power management algorithms, thermal control policies, or dynamic performance optimization.
• Background in tracing frameworks, telemetry systems, or performance analysis.
• Understanding of algorithmic complexity and optimization techniques for embedded systems.
• Familiarity with hardware performance counters, on‑chip monitoring, or hardware debug interfaces.
• Experience with data collection pipelines and scripting (Python, shell) for algorithm validation.
• Understanding of ML training/inference workloads and their performance characteristics.
• Strong ownership, effective teamwork in ambiguous situations, and a bias for action while consistently delivering impactful results.

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.

Location: USA, CA, Cupertino | Salary: $165,200.00 – $223,600.00 USD annually