AI Phone - Hardware Platform / Mobile SoC Architect

About

We are reimagining the phone. AI phones need to be proactive, intuitive, intelligent and low cost. This is a mission critical for rest of the world to adopt intelligence.

There are over 5 billion people using everyday applications such as email, messaging, notes, tasks, and calendars, yet most are not AI-native. Our mission is to build proactive applications and devices that bring intelligence into daily conversations, coordination and workflows, with minimal prompting.

Focus: Defining the hardware platform strategy and specifications for the AI-native phone, ensuring the selected hardware can support both current and future AI capabilities.

This is a more strategic hardware role than Device Integration. The focus is on evaluating hardware architectures, selecting the right SoC and components, defining device specifications, and working with ODMs to translate product requirements into hardware designs.

Responsibilities

• Define the overall hardware platform strategy and roadmap for the phone.

• Evaluate and compare mobile SoC platforms, including Qualcomm, MediaTek and other potential vendors.

• Define hardware specifications covering CPU, GPU, NPU, RAM, storage, memory bandwidth and connectivity.

• Evaluate NPU capabilities, supported AI frameworks, compute performance and memory constraints for on-device AI workloads.

• Define hardware requirements for AI-native features, including always-on hotword detection, camera and audio processing, background AI execution and sensor integration.

• Evaluate power consumption, thermal performance, battery capacity and sustained compute performance.

• Work with product and AI teams to translate future AI capabilities into hardware requirements.

• Assess whether existing commercial platforms can meet our requirements or whether deeper hardware customization is necessary.

• Work directly with ODM/OEM and chipset vendors to review platform proposals, component selection and technical feasibility.

• Review hardware architecture, component specifications and design trade-offs proposed by ODMs.

• Identify opportunities for dedicated AI accelerators, low-power processing and other hardware capabilities that could differentiate the device.

• Establish hardware validation criteria and ensure the selected platform has sufficient headroom for future software and AI capabilities.

Requirements

• Strong experience in smartphone hardware architecture, mobile SoC or embedded hardware engineering.

• Deep understanding of mobile SoC architecture, including CPU, GPU, NPU, memory subsystem and hardware acceleration.

• Experience evaluating and selecting smartphone hardware platforms.

• Understanding of power architecture, thermal management, battery performance and hardware constraints.

• Experience defining hardware specifications and technical requirements for mobile devices.

• Experience working directly with ODM/OEM, chipset vendors and hardware suppliers.

• Ability to translate product and AI requirements into concrete hardware specifications and platform decisions.

Nice to have

• Experience with Qualcomm Snapdragon or MediaTek Dimensity platforms.

• Experience with AI accelerator / NPU architecture and on-device AI workloads.

• Experience with smartphone hardware design and component selection.

• Experience with camera ISP, audio DSP and sensor architecture.

• Experience taking a smartphone product from platform selection through mass production.

• Experience with custom hardware platforms or ODM product development.

Originally posted on Himalayas