---
title: 'Data Center Engineer at Etched'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/data-center-engineer-etched-san-jose-z0xxwc028241'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-07'
---

# Data Center Engineer at Etched

- **Company:** [Etched](https://feeny.ai/companies/etched)
- **Location:** San Jose, CA
- **Compensation:** $130k–$210k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-06-25
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-07
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/etched/bb2d320e-50d1-4182-a0c8-975ad2015e1c/application

**Skills:** Data center engineering, Power architecture, Facility management, Structured cabling, Fiber management, Copper plant management, High-speed networking, Electrical one-line diagrams, DCIM tooling, Vendor management, RFP writing, Competitive evaluation, Liquid cooling systems, Direct liquid cooling, Rear-door heat exchangers, Immersion cooling, AI cluster environments, HPC cluster environments, GPU clusters, ASIC clusters

> Own the end-to-end lifecycle of data center and hardware lab environments, including rack design, power distribution, networking, and facility operations. Collaborate with hardware and platform teams to deploy high-density AI inference infrastructure and ensure operational excellence.

## 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

Deploying next-generation inference hardware at scale requires more than great chips - it demands world-class physical infrastructure. As a Data Center Engineer at Etched, you will own the end-to-end lifecycle of our data center and hardware lab environments: from facility selection and rack design, power distribution, networking layout, cabling, hardware management, day-to-day operations, and long-term capacity planning. You'll work directly with the hardware, platform, and software teams to bring our systems online faster, keep them running harder, and push the limits of what dense, high-power AI inference design and manufacturing infrastructure can do.

This is not a traditional data center operations role. We expect you to treat data center engineering with the same rigor and craftsmanship we apply to our chip design - thinking from first principles about power density, thermal constraints, network topology, and physical security. You'll be making real architectural decisions that directly shape how our products are engineered, manufactured and reach customers.

You will be on the ground in our co-location facilities and lab environments, working hands-on with custom server platforms and high-speed networking. You'll drive the processes, tooling, and vendor relationships that allow us to scale our infrastructure as fast as our product roadmap demands.

## Key Responsibilities

- Own rack layout, capacity planning, power distribution, network design, cabling, and physical deployment of Etched High performance computing platforms across data center and hardware lab environments.
- Design and manage power distribution and redundancy architectures — from utility feeds and PDUs to per-rack power and cooling budgets - for high-density AI compute deployments pushing 90 kW per rack.
- Collaborate with physical infrastructure and facilities teams, as well as external vendors to build and manage highly sophisticated hardware labs used for bring-up, EVT, and customer demos.
- Partner with co-location vendors and internal teams to evaluate sites, negotiate contracts, and enforce SLAs around power, cooling, physical security, and network connectivity.
- Architect and implement high-speed networking infrastructure (100G/200G/400G Ethernet) connecting compute nodes, storage, and upstream peering, in coordination with network and platform engineering teams.
- Develop and maintain asset management systems, rack diagrams, and change control processes to ensure full visibility into physical infrastructure state at all times.
- Build and operate monitoring and alerting for environmental health (temperature, humidity, power draw, UPS state) and drive rapid response to hardware and facility incidents.
- Define and execute preventive maintenance schedules and hardware lifecycle processes, including RMA coordination with vendors and on-site repair.
- Lead capacity planning cycles in lockstep with the hardware roadmap, forecasting power, space, and network needs 6–18 months out and translating those forecasts into facility agreements and procurement plans.
- Establish and enforce physical security procedures, access control policies, and audit trails across all data center sites.

You may be a good fit if you

- Have 5+ years of hands-on data center engineering or operations experience, with direct responsibility for physical hardware deployment, power architecture, and facility management.
- Have designed and deployed high-density compute environments (20 kW/rack and above) and have first-hand experience managing the thermal and power challenges that come with them.
- Are deeply comfortable with structured cabling, fiber and copper plant management, and high-speed networking hardware at scale.
- Can read and interpret electrical one-line diagrams, raised-floor and hot-aisle/cold-aisle plans, and co-location facility documentation without assistance.
- Have built or operated monitoring and DCIM tooling and treat infrastructure visibility as a non-negotiable property of any environment you own.
- Are a strong vendor manager - you know how to write an RFP, run a competitive evaluation, and hold a co-lo or hardware vendor to their commitments.
- Thrive in fast-moving environments where requirements shift quickly and you need to make confident decisions with incomplete information.
- Are driven by ownership and take pride in environments that are clean, documented, and operationally excellent - not just ones that are "up."

Strong candidates may also have experience with

- Physical deployment and bring-up of custom or semi-custom server platforms, including early-stage hardware that doesn't come with vendor support.
- Liquid cooling systems (direct liquid cooling, rear-door heat exchangers, or immersion cooling) and the facility requirements they impose.
- AI or HPC cluster environments - GPU or ASIC clusters, high-radix switch fabrics, RDMA networking.
- Scripting and automation (Python, Bash, Ansible) for asset tracking, environmental monitoring integration, or operational workflows.
- Working within a semiconductor or hardware startup, where roadmaps compress and infrastructure needs to keep pace with silicon.

## Benefits

- Medical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage
- $500 per month credit for waiving medical benefits
- Housing subsidy of $2k 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. 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

- [EE Hardware System Engineer (TW)](https://feeny.ai/job/ee-hardware-system-engineer-tw-etched-taipei-fgncym9kzy6w) — Taipei, Taiwan
- [Silicon Validation Engineer, Software](https://feeny.ai/job/silicon-validation-engineer-software-etched-san-jose-qhp3k9xqy5vr) — San Jose, CA
- [RMA & Repair Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/rma-repair-lead-etched-san-jose-q0tmchh0yyrj) — San Jose, CA
- [Advanced Packaging SI/PI Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/advanced-packaging-si-pi-engineer-etched-san-jose-47he7k0hp901) — San Jose, CA
- [Substrate IC Package Layout Design Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/substrate-ic-package-layout-design-engineer-etched-san-jose-g36wmxc8ww9r) — San Jose, CA
- [ECAD Librarian](https://feeny.ai/job/ecad-librarian-etched-san-jose-0h5kvj2cxzk4) — San Jose, CA
- [Inventory Warehouse Coordinator](https://feeny.ai/job/inventory-warehouse-coordinator-etched-san-jose-49b0bs49ce57) — San Jose, CA
- [Logistics Analyst (Taiwan)](https://feeny.ai/job/logistics-analyst-taiwan-etched-taipei-5xzc094cqgzn) — Taipei, Taiwan
- [Communications](https://feeny.ai/job/communications-etched-san-jose-3f4bdr97hysp) — San Jose, CA
- [Production Finance](https://feeny.ai/job/production-finance-etched-san-jose-qfypbv9eh0ws) — San Jose, CA