Sr. Firmware Engineer, Annapurna Labs, Machine Learning Acceleration - Power and Performance

About the role

AWS Utility Computing (UC) provides product Annapurna Labs (our organization within AWS UC) designs silicon and software that accelerates innovation. Customers choose us to create cloud solutions that solve challenges that were unimaginable a short time ago—even yesterday. 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.

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

• Implement optimization algorithms for resource allocation, frequency/voltage scaling, and workload scheduling

• Build 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

Requirements

• 5+ years of non-internship professional software development experience

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, electrical engineering, or related field

• Strong firmware or embedded systems development experience

• Proficiency in C/C++ for systems programming with strong foundation 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

Qualifications

• Experience developing control algorithms, optimization algorithms, or state machines in firmware

• 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

• Takes strong ownership, works effectively in ambiguous situations, demonstrates a bias for action while consistently delivering impactful results