Virtual Platform Engineering Sr. Manager, Annapurna Labs Machine Learning Accelerators, AWS

AWS's Trainium and Inferentia chips power the world's largest machine learning clusters. Our team builds virtual platforms — full-system C++ models of these custom SoCs — that let software teams start development months before silicon exists. For Trainium3, our virtual platform enabled a full training workload within 12 hours of first silicon, putting servers in customer hands within weeks!

We're hiring a hands-on engineering manager to lead and scale our virtual platform effort. You'll own the end-to-end delivery of virtual platforms that our software partners depend on — from model architecture and level of detail, through deployment and customer enablement. This is a builder-leader role: you'll set the technical direction while staying close to the code and your customers.

What you'll do:
- Lead the team delivering virtual platforms used by design verification as well as driver, runtime, collectives, and application software teams to develop and validate software pre-silicon
- Own the virtual platform roadmap — deciding what to model, at what fidelity, and when to deliver it, based on customer needs and chip schedules
- Drive platform usability, performance, and scalability so teams can run real workloads on your models efficiently
- Build and improve the tooling, CI, and release infrastructure around the virtual platform so customers get reliable, well-documented drops
- Partner closely with software teams and design verification to understand their workflows and shape the platform to maximize their productivity
- Hire and develop a team of strong modeling engineers, setting high standards for code quality, testing, and delivery
- Dive into technical problems when needed - debug model issues, review architecture decisions, and unblock the team

Why this role is interesting:
- Your virtual platform directly accelerates AWS's most strategic silicon programs — software teams literally can't start without you
- You'll own a product with real internal customers who give you direct feedback, not just a component buried in a larger system
- The problem space is rich: full-system simulation, multi-subsystem integration, QEMU development, performance at scale, machine learning at the bleeding edge
- Small team, big impact, startup pace inside AWS's custom silicon org

No ML background needed. You’ll learn the required ML domain knowledge on the job. What matters is deep virtual platform or system modeling experience and the ability to lead a technical team.

About the team
More details about Trainium3, our team's latest achievement, as well as some insights into our team culture:
- (https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws/trainium-3-ultraserver-faster-ai-training-lower-cost)

Basic Qualifications

- 7+ years of engineering team management experience
- Knowledge of SoC architecture
- 15+ years writing functional or performance models for SoCs, CPUs, GPUs, or ASICs
- Strong C++ and/or SystemC skills in large-scale OOP codebases

Preferred Qualifications

- Experience hiring, developing and promoting engineering talent
- Experience with high-performance, multi-threaded, or distributed systems
- Experience developing and calibrating performance models for custom silicon
- Background writing benchmarks and analyzing model performance
- ML accelerator architecture knowledge (a plus, not required)
- Experience building CI/CD regression frameworks and developer tooling
- Familiarity with AWS EC2 for development workflows

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

Los Angeles County applicants: Job duties for this position include: work safely and cooperatively with other employees, supervisors, and staff; adhere to standards of excellence despite stressful conditions; communicate effectively and respectfully with employees, supervisors, and staff to ensure exceptional customer service; and follow all federal, state, and local laws and Company policies. Criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above, as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies, exercise sound judgment, effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others, exhibit trustworthiness and professionalism, and safeguard business operations and the Company’s reputation. Pursuant to the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If you have a disability and need a workplace accommodation or adjustment during the application and hiring process, incl