Hardware System Engineer – AirPods System Technologies – Digital

Summary

Posted: Oct 25, 2024

Role Number:200575712

The AirPods System Technologies Team is looking for electrical engineers who are eager to help define technologies that will be fundamental to our future products. Our team is responsible for architecting, developing, and delivering features and technologies that fit within the most challenging physical and power envelopes in a way that only Apple can.

Description

As part of the team you will be responsible for developing specifications for, analyzing, and reviewing designs for custom silicon from both in-house designers as well as third-party vendors. You will also seek out and investigate new technologies that can be leveraged to deliver groundbreaking new features to our customers. Specific focus areas will include digital design and computer architecture of custom silicon, analysis of interface / data path efficiency and security, and evaluation of user-facing use cases as they impact both of these. Knowledge of how submodules of a complete system architecture interact is critical for projecting and mitigating coexistence issues at the architectural level. Working within the tiny power and physical envelope that AirPods demand requires careful consideration of every microwatt and every square millimeter. Nothing comes for free, so you will need to understand and navigate all the tradeoffs across various engineering disciplines to come to a realizable solution.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelors or Masters degree in Electrical Engineering or equivalent
• 7+ years of proven experience in electronic system design, or in top-level chip architecture / specification
• Excellent EE fundamentals: basic circuits, analog, digital, power
• Familiarity working with open ended constraints and relying on understanding the user experience to define electrical requirements

Preferred Qualifications

• Acquaintance with the ASIC / semiconductor development and manufacturing process
• Familiarity with common digital architecture fundamentals such as memory and power state management
• Understanding of how computer design tradeoffs affect power consumption
• Ability to understand tradeoffs amongst the electrical, mechanical, and software domains
• Practical knowledge with various communication protocols (especially USB, SPI, I2C and UART)
• Hands-on experience in prototype bring-up, debugging and functional verification is extremely beneficial