---
title: 'Electricals Materials Handler (Inventory) at Etched'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/electricals-materials-handler-inventory-etched-san-jose-6azxve93tnjp'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-02'
---

# Electricals Materials Handler (Inventory) at Etched

- **Company:** [Etched](https://feeny.ai/companies/etched)
- **Location:** San Jose, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-10-28
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-02
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/etched/5cc3e04b-d19e-40cb-ac86-a71017365448

## 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 The Electricals Materials Handler owns the lifecycle of every electrical component that goes onto an Etched module: from receiving, through storage, inspection and kitting, to consumption on our in-house SMT line and at our contract manufacturers (CMs). You'll sit on the Inventory team and be the source of truth for board electricals: what we have, where it is, what condition it is in, and what is about to run out. This hire will run clean consignment with CMs.Success looks like: Etched-owned material at CM sites is counted, reconciled and traceable, so builds don't stall on a missing reel and variances get closed.Board materials are accounted fully: moisture-sensitive parts are handled correctly, kits match the released BOM with no shortages or substitutions, and scrap and write-offs trend toward zero. The data you produce lets Procurement buy against real on-hand, consumed and in-transit numbers instead of estimates.

## Key Responsibilities

- Storage and handling: Receive, label, measure quantity, inspect and put away board electricals, connectors and boards, with full traceability. Run ESD-safe handling and moisture-sensitivity (MSD) control: dry cabinets, bake-out, exposure-time tracking.
- Consignment with CMs: Own the record of Etched-owned material held at contract manufacturers: shipments out, consumption, returns and scrap. Run cycle counts and periodic reconciliations against CM reports; investigate and close every variance.
- Incoming quality control: Inspect incoming lots: part marking, quantity, packaging, reel and tray condition, date codes. Quarantine and disposition non-conforming material; raise supplier issues through Procurement. Keep first-article and inspection records for every new part number and supplier.
- Kitting: Pull and kit components to the released BOM and revision for prototype builds, bring-up boards, in-house SMT runs and CM production. Flag shortages, substitutions and revision mismatches before the kit ships, not after the line stops. Pack and document kits for line-side staging and CM handoff, including MSD status and special-handling notes.
- Reporting to Procurement: Publish a weekly view of on-hand, allocated, in-transit and at-CM quantities by part number. Flag parts approaching reorder point, excess or obsolete stock, and lots nearing MSD or shelf-life limits. Feed actual consumption and scrap data back so forecasts and PO quantities match reality.
- Processes: Write the SOPs for receiving, consignment transfers, RMA and return-to-stock so the process does not depend on who is on shift. Contribute to the ESD, 5S and safety programs shared with the SMT line.
- Automation: Help our agentic manufacturing team pull inventory and consumption data into automated reporting and reorder signals.

You may be a good fit if you have (Must-have qualifications)

- 2+ years handling electronic components in a manufacturing, EMS/CM, or hardware-startup environment.
- Working knowledge of ESD control (ANSI/ESD S20.20) and moisture-sensitivity handling (IPC/JEDEC J-STD-033).
- Able to read a BOM, a PCB assembly drawing and a component datasheet, and spot when a delivered part does not match them.
- Hands-on experience with an ERP or inventory system (NetSuite, SAP, Oracle, or similar) for receiving, transfers and cycle counts.
- Comfortable in spreadsheets: lookups, pivots
- Experience working with contract manufacturers on consigned or customer-furnished material.
- Organized under pressure: prototype builds change daily and the kit still has to be right.
- Clear written communication; organization of your thoughts and process not just for yourself but for others to work with.
- Passionate about automating parts of the job with agentic AI models, and willing to learn about this on the job.
- Ownership mentality: accountable to the outcome, and do whatever it takes to get to the goal.

Strong candidates may also have experience with (Nice-to-have qualifications)

- IPC-A-610 or IPC-7711/7721 certification, or SMT line experience.
- Experience setting up consignment or vendor-managed inventory programs from scratch.
- Familiarity with counterfeit-avoidance practices (AS6081 / AS5553) and authorized-distributor sourcing.
- Exposure to datacenter hardware: accelerator cards, server base boards, high-power or high-speed interconnect components.
- Forklift or pallet-jack certification.

## 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

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification.

## Compensation range

- $60,000 - 90,000, with equity

## 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 the SMT line and material storage are located in nearby Milpitas; this role splits time between the two sites. The role involves lifting up to 50 lb, standing for extended periods and working in an ESD-controlled area, with occasional travel to CM sites. We do not have boundaries between teams, and we expect everyone to work across disciplines as needed. As set forth in Etched's Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

## 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

- [Build Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/build-engineer-etched-san-jose-dmb7by4dkav7) — San Jose, CA
- [Inventory Site Lead (Milpitas)](https://feeny.ai/job/inventory-site-lead-milpitas-etched-san-jose-mzfdmk6qz5fp) — San Jose, CA
- [Strategic Buyer](https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-buyer-etched-san-jose-d8bna5vet7aw) — San Jose, CA
- [People Operations Generalist](https://feeny.ai/job/people-operations-generalist-etched-san-jose-qgrbrkrq0kx2) — San Jose, CA
- [Manufacturing Operations Program Manager (Taiwan)](https://feeny.ai/job/manufacturing-operations-program-manager-taiwan-etched-taoyuan-31grtwdgzvxw) — Taoyuan, Taiwan
- [Core Engineering Intern](https://feeny.ai/job/core-engineering-intern-etched-san-jose-fcf2ty5ebmnr) — San Jose, CA
- [Forward Deployed Systems Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-systems-engineer-etched-san-jose-s3zf8j5vd0va) — San Jose, CA
- [Infrastructure Engineer, Factory Acceleration](https://feeny.ai/job/infrastructure-engineer-factory-acceleration-etched-san-jose-zhzf6k3drvsy) — San Jose, CA
- [Design Engineer, Factory Acceleration](https://feeny.ai/job/design-engineer-factory-acceleration-etched-san-jose-t9g2qtym21s9) — San Jose, CA
- [Forward Deployment Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployment-engineer-etched-san-jose-sbpdvtz1r1sb) — San Jose, CA