--- title: 'Chip Simulation Lead at Etched' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/chip-simulation-lead-etched-san-jose-6d9bt85ms6tx' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-11-09' --- # Chip Simulation Lead at Etched - **Company:** [Etched](https://feeny.ai/companies/etched) - **Location:** San Jose, CA - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-11-02 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-09 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Etched/63fac167-8d31-4d11-af59-475fef12a688 ## Job description ## About Etched Etched is building hardware for frontier intelligence. We co-design chips, racks, software, and manufacturing to deliver best-in-class throughput and latency across both prefill and decode workloads. Our first products are heavily focused on inference. Backed by hundreds of millions from top-tier investors and staffed by leading engineers, Etched is redefining the infrastructure layer for the fastest growing industry in history. Job Summary We are looking for a Lead Chip Simulation Engineer to drive the technical direction and development of our custom AI accelerator simulation infrastructure. Our chip simulation team builds the hardware models that enable software development, debugging, and hardware-software co-design before silicon is available. In this role, you will guide engineers working on our bit-accurate, cycle-aware chip simulator, review designs and code, and ensure the team builds accurate, performant, and maintainable simulation infrastructure. You'll work closely with hardware architects, firmware, kernel, and software teams to identify technical challenges, set priorities, and enable early development of our full software stack. This is a highly technical leadership role for someone who enjoys mentoring engineers, solving complex systems problems, and staying close to the code. ## Key Responsibilities - Provide technical leadership for the chip simulation team, guiding engineers through architecture, implementation, debugging, and performance optimization. - Own the technical direction of our simulation infrastructure, ensuring accuracy, scalability, performance, and maintainability. - Lead design and code reviews, establishing engineering best practices and maintaining a high bar for code quality. - Mentor and support engineers, helping them navigate complex technical challenges. - Drive hardware-software co-design, partnering with hardware architects and software teams to influence architecture and enable pre-silicon development. - Oversee simulator integration, including simulated hardware modules, QEMU-based host integration, and multi-chip simulation. - Guide validation and testing strategies to ensure simulation correctness and alignment with hardware specifications. - Remain technically hands-on when needed, contributing to critical implementations, debugging, and architectural prototyping. Representative Projects - Lead the development of simulation models for our custom AI accelerator. - Guide engineers building and validating bit-accurate and cycle-aware models of on-chip modules. - Review and drive integration of simulated chips with QEMU hosts, enabling kernel driver development and host software testing. - Define the architecture for multi-chip simulation to validate scale-out and scale-up approaches. - Establish code review, testing, and debugging practices to improve simulator accuracy and engineering velocity. - Partnering with hardware architects and software engineering leads to resolve complex pre-silicon issues and guide technical decisions. You May Be a Good Fit If You Have - Deep expertise in C/C++ and low-level systems software development. - Experience leading complex technical projects and guiding other engineers through design, implementation, and code reviews. - Strong understanding of computer architecture, hardware-software interfaces, and systems programming. - Experience building or developing hardware simulators, architectural models, or other complex systems software. - Ability to make architectural decisions, evaluate technical tradeoffs, and maintain high engineering standards. - Strong debugging and problem-solving skills across hardware and software boundaries. - Experience mentoring engineers and collaborating across technical disciplines. - A track record of owning complex software systems from architecture through delivery. Strong Candidates May Also Have Experience With - Developing hardware or system simulators using SystemC, gem5, QEMU, or custom simulation frameworks. - Cycle-accurate, cycle-aware, or bit-accurate hardware modeling. - Custom AI accelerators, GPUs, CPUs, or SoC architectures. - Firmware, kernel, and driver development, including Linux or FreeRTOS. - Hardware verification and validation methodologies. - Multithreaded and multiprocessing simulation frameworks. - Simulation performance profiling and optimization. - Python-based testing infrastructure, Bazel, and Git. - Leading small technical teams or owning simulation infrastructure in a semiconductor or accelerator startup. ## Benefits - Medical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage - $500 per month credit for waiving medical benefits - Housing subsidy of $2,500 per month for those living within walking distance of the office - Relocation support for those moving to San Jose (Santana Row) - Various wellness benefits covering fitness, mental health, and more - Daily lunch and dinner in our office - Unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification ## How we’re different Etched believes in the[Bitter Lesson](http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html). We are the first inference-focused frontier AI system, betting early on transformer and transformer-like architectures and on increasing model sizes. Our addressable market is the entirety of inference, unlike many of our competitors. We are a fully in-person team in San Jose (Santana Row), and greatly value engineering skills. We do not have boundaries between engineering and research, and we expect all of our technical staff to contribute to both and work across disciplines as needed. ## About Etched ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Etched designs and manufactures specialized ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits) that are hardwired to run transformer-based AI models, offering an order-of-magnitude improvement in inference cost and energy efficiency over general-purpose GPUs. - **Entity Type**: Private (Series B / later stage; total raised $800M as of June 2026) - **Headquarters**: San Jose, California, USA (also has offices in Cupertino, CA; Sacramento, CA; and small presence in Taiwan, Canada, UK, Bulgaria) - **Founded**: 2022 - **Founders**: Gavin Uberti (CEO), Robert Wachen (President & COO), Chris Zhu (Co-Founder) ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: AI hardware / semiconductor design / computer hardware manufacturing - **Target customers**: Frontier AI labs, hyperscalers, and enterprises running large-scale transformer inference workloads (B2B, enterprise) - **Mission / purpose**: Build hardware for superintelligence – specifically, the world’s most powerful servers for transformer inference. ## Products & Services - **Sohu Chip (ASIC)**: A transformer-specific ASIC manufactured by TSMC. It burns the transformer architecture directly into silicon, eliminating the overhead of general-purpose GPUs for inference. - **Frontier Inference Clusters**: Full-stack systems that bundle the Sohu chip with custom-designed racks, networking, and software. Customers place orders for complete systems, not just chips. Etched claims they deliver more tokens per dollar and per watt for dense models, sparse MoEs, diffusion models, and more. - **Software Stack**: Includes compiler and runtime optimizations built by a team with deep experience (former Apache TVM developer, ex-Google TPU software lead). ## Market Standing - **Valuation**: $5 billion post-money valuation (as of December 2025 / disclosed June 2026) - **Key Metric**: $1 billion in contract orders (booked) for its systems; total funding of $800M (including an unannounced $500M round closed Dec 2025 led by Stripes) - **Notable Investors**: Stripes (lead), VentureTech Alliance, Jane Street, Hudson River Trading, Two Sigma, Ribbit Capital. Angel investors include Andrej Karpathy, Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Arthur Mensch, Scott Wu, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Thiel. Earlier backers: Positive Sum, Primary Venture Partners. - **Growth Signals**: - Headcount: 258 employees (as of mid-2026), up 141% year-over-year - 100+ active job postings across engineering, operations, and business functions - $500M raise in late 2025; first chip manufactured by TSMC in 2025 and now being tested with customers - Talent sources include Google (21), Apple (17), NVIDIA (16), Tesla (11), Intel (10), AMD (5) ## Competitive Advantages - **Transformer-specific architecture**: Unlike GPUs (which are general-purpose), Etched’s chip is hardwired only for transformer operations, enabling drastically lower cost and latency for today’s dominant AI model architecture. - **Full-stack system play**: By selling entire inference clusters (chip + rack + software), Etched captures more value and delivers a turnkey solution competitive with NVIDIA’s DGX/HGX systems. - **Deeply experienced leadership**: - CEO Gavin Uberti (Harvard math researcher, AI compiler expert, Apache TVM contributor) - President Robert Wachen (co-founded Prod AI incubator; Thiel Fellow) - VP of Platform (ex-NVIDIA 22 years, built HGX/DGX systems) - VP of Software (ex-Google DeepMind, lead TPU v1–v5 software) - Chief Architect Saptadeep Pal (former Auradine co-founder, chiplet expert) - VP of Hardware Engineering Ajat Hukkoo (ex-Cypress CTO, shipped >$1B revenue products) ## Strategic Focus - **Scale manufacturing and customer deliveries**: With the first chip successfully fabricated, the company is now testing production systems and aims to fulfill $1B in pre-orders. - **Expand engineering talent**: Aggressively hiring across silicon design, validation, infrastructure, optics, and software to support volume ramp. - **Maintain technological lead**: Continue refining the ASIC for future transformer variants and MoE mixtures while building out a partner ecosystem. ## Why Work Here - **Mission-driven, high-impact engineering**: “Building the hardware for superintelligence” – the company is solving one of the hardest problems in compute (inference efficiency) with a focused team. - **Top-tier team and learning environment**: Colleagues from Google, NVIDIA, Apple, Tesla, Broadcom, and Intel; exposure to full-stack chip-to-system design. - **In-office culture**: All roles are in-office (Cupertino and San Jose, CA). The company emphasizes on-site collaboration for hardware development. Notable perks are not heavily advertised, but compensation is competitive for the AI hardware space (equity-heavy). - **Growth trajectory**: 141% headcount growth YoY, hundreds of open roles, and a $5B valuation signal strong backing and career acceleration potential. - **Intellectual challenge**: Work on chip simulation, RTL design, system validation, or software infrastructure for cutting-edge AI inference. ## Sources 1. [etched.com/careers](https://www.etched.com/careers) 2. [builtin.com/company/etched](https://builtin.com/company/etched) 3. [linkedin.com/company/etched-ai](https://www.linkedin.com/company/etched-ai) 4. [cbinsights.com/company/etched](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/etched) 5. [techcrunch.com/2026/06/30/nvidia-competitor-etched-hits-5b-valuation-1b-in-sales-for-ai-chip/](https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/30/nvidia-competitor-etched-hits-5b-valuation-1b-in-sales-for-ai-chip/) ## Other roles at Etched - [Electrical Engineer - Next Gen Development (TW)](https://feeny.ai/job/electrical-engineer-next-gen-development-tw-etched-taipei-1p5eavhnv899) — Taipei, Taiwan - [Infrastructure Engineering & Projects Intern](https://feeny.ai/job/infrastructure-engineering-projects-intern-etched-san-jose-nex7pv255w2v) — San Jose, CA - [Site Reliability Engineer - Fleet Command & Control](https://feeny.ai/job/site-reliability-engineer-fleet-command-control-etched-san-jose-q5m27r8np5cv) — San Jose, CA - [IA Research Engineer Intern](https://feeny.ai/job/ia-research-engineer-intern-etched-san-jose-vhnrfnhzby7x) — San Jose, CA - [Build Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/build-engineer-etched-san-jose-zmxm6znacgm1) — San Jose, CA - [Inventory Site Lead (Milpitas)](https://feeny.ai/job/inventory-site-lead-milpitas-etched-san-jose-n83f9gpfm42w) — San Jose, CA - [Strategic Buyer](https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-buyer-etched-san-jose-e9vh7zjgpwv0) — San Jose, CA - [People Operations Generalist](https://feeny.ai/job/people-operations-generalist-etched-san-jose-mct9adxz70g2) — San Jose, CA - [Manufacturing Operations Program Manager (Taiwan)](https://feeny.ai/job/manufacturing-operations-program-manager-taiwan-etched-taoyuan-a7vyayy8zrh7) — Taoyuan, Taiwan - [Core Engineering Intern](https://feeny.ai/job/core-engineering-intern-etched-san-jose-b2df2xe1eezt) — San Jose, CA