Cristiano Amon

Amon was born in Brazil. He grew up in Campinas, state of São Paulo, Brazil. His father was an electrical engineer and Amon chose to study electrical engineering at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas as well. Early on, he developed an interest in radio communications. He earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at that university in 1992. At the time, the first generation of cellular radio (1G) was in use.

Early career

Amon started his career working for telecommunications companies during the early development of cell phone networks. His first position out of college was with NEC's Brazilian arm. For that position, he moved to Tokyo, Japan, and frequently travelled to San Diego, California, to meet with Qualcomm. In 1996, Amon was hired by Qualcomm to help the company expand in Latin America.

A few years later, Amon left Qualcomm. He worked for Ericsson for a short while, then joined VeloCom, an investment firm focused on the telecommunications industry. While there, he was assigned to work at Vésper, a struggling telecom company that was nearing bankruptcy. Amon worked for the Brazilian telecom company as its chief technology officer and chief operating officer until it was profitable. Then, Vésper was sold to competitor Embratel in 2003.

Qualcomm

In 2004, he joined Qualcomm again.

He received several promotions over the years, working as SVP of product management, EVP of Qualcomm Technologies, and President of Qualcomm's CDMA division.

Amon was an important figure in the development of Qualcomm's 4G technology and the growth of Qualcomm's Snapdragon semiconductors. He also expanded Qualcomm's sales with smartphone manufacturers in China. Amon oversaw Qualcomm's expansion outside of cell phones into semiconductors used in cars, computers, 5G infrastructure, robots, industrial applications, virtual reality devices, and other electronic devices.

During Steven Mollenkopf's tenure as CEO of Qualcomm, Amon was responsible for Qualcomm's 5G strategy. He was responsible for improvements in Qualcomm's radio processors that are partially responsible for Qualcomm's market-share in 5G devices. Amon was appointed President of Qualcomm in 2018 by then-CEO Mollenkopf. He led a $1.4 billion acquisition of a company founded by former Apple executives called Nuvia and re-focused it on CPUs for consumer products, instead of data centers.