Etched

Developer Experience Engineer at Etched (San Jose, CA)

Etched· San Jose, CA· $275k+·

Role details

Salary
$275k+
Work type
Onsite
Employment
Full-Time
Skills
PythonSlurmPrometheusGrafanaOpenTelemetryDockerKubernetesGitHub ActionsJenkinsBuildkiteTerraformAnsible
Benefits

Medical, Dental, And Vision Packages · Housing Subsidy Of $2,000/Month · Daily Lunch And Dinner · Relocation Support

Etched at a glance

Transformer-specific ASICs and rack-scale systems that hardwire the transformer into silicon for faster, cheaper AI inference.

Etched designs transformer-specific ASICs and full rack-scale inference systems. Its Sohu chip hardwires the transformer architecture directly into silicon, trading a GPU's general-purpose flexibility for far higher throughput, lower latency, and better power efficiency on AI inference. Customers buy complete co-designed clusters, chip plus rack plus software, not standalone chips.

$800M raised · latest: $500M · led by Stripes · Dec 2025 (reported Jan 2026) · backed by Stripes, Peter Thiel, Ribbit Capital, VentureTech Alliance

Summary

Enhance developer productivity, automation, and infrastructure across hardware and software teams by building systems that accelerate chip design, simulation, and AI model deployment in a hybrid cloud environment.

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 Developer Experience Engineer to enhance developer productivity, automation, and infrastructure across our hardware and software teams. You will work at the intersection of DevOps, software engineering, and high-performance computing (HPC), building systems that accelerate chip design, simulation, and AI model deployment in a cloud and on-prem hybrid environment.

Key responsibilities

  • Develop and maintain automation tools to streamline development, testing, and deployment workflows.
  • Optimize and manage Slurm-based job scheduling for AI workloads, simulation, and chip design workflows.
  • Build observability solutions using Grafana, Prometheus, and OpenTelemetry for monitoring pipelines, infrastructure, and compute clusters.
  • Manage and optimize containerized environments using Docker and Kubernetes to enhance scalability and reproducibility.
  • Enhance build, test, and deployment pipelines with CI/CD tools like GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Buildkite, or Bazel.
  • Develop caching and artifact management systems to reduce build times and improve dependency resolution.
  • Integrate and manage cloud resources (AWS, GCP) for scaling compute, storage, and hybrid workloads.
  • Support security and compliance efforts including secrets management and access control.
  • Document and share best practices for efficient developer tooling and workflows.

You may be a good fit if you have

  • Strong Python skills for automation, scripting, and infrastructure development.
  • Experience with Slurm job scheduling in an HPC or hybrid environment.
  • Hands-on experience with observability and monitoring tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry.
  • Expertise with Docker and Kubernetes, including Helm charts and cluster management.
  • Proficiency in modern CI/CD pipeline management with tools like GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or Buildkite.
  • Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform or Ansible.
  • Knowledge of cloud infrastructure, compute, and storage optimization on AWS or GCP.

Strong candidates may also have experience with

  • Data pipelining for AI/ML workflows using Airflow, Prefect, or Dagster.
  • Build system expertise with Bazel, CMake, or distributed build systems.
  • Secrets management tools such as Vault, SOPS, AWS Secrets Manager, or GCP Secret Manager.
  • AI/ML model training workflows and monitoring GPU-accelerated workloads.
  • Exposure to FPGA or ASIC development environments and workflows.

Benefits

  • Full medical, dental, and vision packages, with generous premium coverage
  • Housing subsidy of $2,000/month for those living within walking distance of the office
  • Daily lunch and dinner in our office
  • Relocation support for those moving to West San Jose
  • Unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification

How we’re different

Etched believes in the Bitter Lesson incompleteideas.net/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.

Why work at Etched

  • 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.

Application questions