Google’s got serious about its smartphones ambitions last year with its Pixel lineup. Despite being manufactured by HTC, the phone had no HTC-branding and was completely marketed by Google.

Now, Google seems to be getting very serious about its smartphones ambitions as it has hired veteran chip architect Manu Gulati as the Lead SOC Architect. He had previously worked for over 15 years at AMD and Broadcom which gives him plenty of experience in chip designing.

Mr Gulati was previously working at Apple for the last eight years where he played a key role in helping develop Apple’s custom A-series chipset which the company started using in its iOS devices since 2010. Apple’s use of its own custom designed A-series chipset has given it a huge advantage over other OEMs in terms of performance and power efficiency.

In addition to Gulati, Google is also looking hire additional chip experts for its future Pixel devices. The company has been posting many job postings for chip-related work like “Mobile SoC Architect” and “SoC CPU Architect.”

Google has so far relied on Qualcomm’s chips for its devices, but the company has already previously made its intention clear of building its own chips for future devices. By designing its own custom chip, Google will be able to better optimise it for performance and battery life which should give it an advantage over other devices in the market that has traditionally relied on Qualcomm chips.