JACOB WINICKDesigns · Seattle, WA

Sheet A-001 · General arrangement

Jacob
Winick

I build satellite modems. As one of the first hundred employees at Amazon Leo, I carried its custom modem silicon from MATLAB simulation through seven chip iterations to production firmware on orbit. Now I lead a seven-person firmware team and build AI-first, agentic test infrastructure. I started in machine-learning research, and next I want to help bring frontier AI to product.

  1. Engineering manager, modem systems embedded firmware, Amazon Leo
  2. M.S. EE, UT Austin, research in machine learning for wireless
  3. Next: bringing frontier AI from prototype to product at scale
Drawing register Résumé
Fig. 0Detail — 16-QAM, AWGN channel · simulated live
IQ
15.0 dB
Symbol errors
7 / 512
SER, theory
0.018

Drag Es/N0. Red points are decoded wrong.

Section A–A: Simulation to orbit

Amazon Leo · Mar 2020 – present
  1. 01 · SIMMATLAB modem simulationProprietary waveform, multi-TTI
  2. 02 · PRE-SiVerification infrastructurePython · MATLAB · AWS regression
  3. 03 · POST-SiPHY bring-up7 silicon iterations
  4. 04 · FWProduction firmwareTerminal DL PHY · gateway MIMO
  5. 05 · ORBITOn-orbit operationDaily PHY triage · BLER analysis

Seven silicon iterations · team grown 3 → 7 in one quarter · first prototype satellites launched on Atlas V

Selected drawings

Full register →

Research from graduate school and things I build outside work. The day job is in the résumé.

Dwg no.TitleDisciplineYearRevStatus
JW-101Neural LDPC DecodingBelief-propagation LDPC decoding unrolled into a trainable PyTorch network, fed by a learned LLR estimator for quantized OFDM.research2019BReleased
JW-102Quantized OFDM DetectionA learned LLR detector for OFDM behind 1-, 3-, and 5-bit ADCs, swept over clipping level and loss weighting, AWGN and fading.research2019–2020AReleased
JW-202Branches — Trip PlannerA map-first trip planner where the itinerary is a notebook of cells. Notes become pins on the map, and AI cells add places.software2026AIn progress
JW-203SecretaryAn LLM agent harness over my personal notes. The model is the brain, and one small read-only module is the only code touching disk.software2026AIn progress

General notes

  1. Each drawing lists its stack under Materials in the title block.
  2. This sheet is the current revision and supersedes jacobwinick.com (2019).
  3. Off the clock: backcountry skiing, bikepacking, sailing, film photography, violin and saxophone. A camper van is under construction. See About.
Revisions
RevDateDescription
A2026-11-09Initial release. Supersedes jacobwinick.com (2019).