Firmware Engineer at Etched (Cupertino, CA)

Etched· Cupertino, CA·6d ago

Job description

Etched was founded on the belief that new hardware will be needed to run human- and superhuman-level artificial intelligence. Our ASIC systems deliver orders of magnitude higher performance than conventional AI chips. Etched is actively developing Sohu, an ASIC exclusively for transformers, which will enable products that would be impossible with GPUs, like real-time video generation models and extremely deep chain-of-thought reasoning. And we're bringing this technology to market in months, not years. Sohu is hard-coded for individual model architectures and only supports transformers, but has an order of magnitude more throughput and lower latency than a B200.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

Co-Develop cutting-edge software optimized across hardware and software driving the full potential of very large transformer models.
Solve challenging problems across the full stack, from low-level drivers and APIs to high-level applications and frameworks.
Contribute to the development of AI solutions that will revolutionize industries like natural language processing, chain of reasoning automation, generative media.

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
3 years of experience in software development, and with data structures/algorithms.
3 years of experience developing and testing software on launching products.
3 years of experience with firmware design, implementation, and troubleshooting.
3 years of experience with embedded architectures, IO technologies (I2C, SPI, PCIe, DRAM etc.), as well as concepts like scalability, fault tolerance, and consistency.

Preferred qualifications:

Master’s degree Computer Science, or a related technical field.
Experience resolving customer-related issues.
Experience solving ambiguous problems.
Excellent verbal and written communication skills.

Why Etched.ai?

Be part of a dynamic startup that's changing the landscape of AI.
Work on the most advanced AI hardware in the world.
Enjoy a competitive salary and benefits package.
Make a meaningful contribution to the future of technology.

If you're a talented software engineer who's excited to shape the future of AI, we encourage you to apply!

To Apply:

Please visit our website at etched.ai/careers to submit your resume and cover letter.

Location: Cupertino, California

Why work at Etched

High-Impact, High-Ambition Environment: Described as "end-to-end owners" who "own company-critical outcomes." The culture is built for people who want to move fast and solve hard, unsolved problems in AI hardware.
Cutting-Edge Tech: Work on the absolute frontier of chip design and AI inference. The company is building what could be the most important AI chip of the decade.
Exceptional Team: Colleagues include veterans from Nvidia, Apple, Google, and DeepMind. Learning opportunities are immense.
Rapid Growth: Headcount is doubling annually, offering significant career growth and ownership opportunities for early hires.
Culture Mantras: "Production is the product," "Build the machine" (team-building is as important as the hardware).
Work Policy: Primarily on-site in Cupertino/San Jose, CA. The company emphasizes in-person collaboration for hardware development.
Notable Perks: Working on a mission to build "the hardware for superintelligence" with massive financial backing and a clear product-market fit signal ($1B in orders).

About Etched

Company Overview

One-liner: Etched builds specialized ASIC chips (the "Sohu" chip) designed exclusively for transformer-based AI models, aiming to deliver dramatically faster and more cost-efficient inference than general-purpose GPUs like Nvidia's.
Entity Type: Private (Series B / Venture Round)
Headquarters: San Jose, California, United States (primary HQ); also has a major office in Cupertino, CA, and offices in Taiwan, Canada, the UK, and Bulgaria.
Founded: 2022
Founders: Gavin Uberti (CEO), Chris Zhu (Co-Founder), Robert Wachen (Co-Founder & President)

Core Business

Primary industry/industries: Computer Hardware Manufacturing, AI Infrastructure, Semiconductor Design
Target customers: B2B; Enterprise AI labs, large language model (LLM) companies, cloud providers, and hyperscalers needing high-performance inference compute.
Mission or purpose statement: "Building the hardware for superintelligence." The company's stated goal is to enable the next generation of AI models by solving the inference bottleneck.

Products & Services

[Sohu ASIC Chip]: A custom-designed "Transformer ASIC" that is hardwired to run transformer models (the architecture behind GPT, Claude, Gemini, etc.). It is designed to be orders of magnitude faster and more power-efficient than Nvidia's H100/B200 for inference.
[Frontier Inference Clusters]: Full-stack systems—bundles of Sohu chips, custom-designed racks, and specialized software—sold as turnkey "frontier inference clusters" to customers.
[Software Stack]: A custom compiler and runtime (including a TensorFlow TVM backend) to optimize model deployment on the Sohu hardware.

Market Standing

Valuation/Market Cap: $5 billion post-money valuation (as of a $500M round closed in December 2025, announced June 2026).
Key Metric: $1 billion in contract orders for its product (as of June 2026). Annual revenue is reported at $40M (likely pre-revenue or early-stage contract bookings).
Total Funding: $800 million to date.
- Seed Round (May 2023): $5.4M led by Primary Venture Partners.
- Series A (June 2024): $120M led by Positive Sum and Primary Venture Partners.
- Series B / Venture Round (Dec 2025): $500M led by Stripes. Participants include VentureTech Alliance, Jane Street, Hudson River Trading, Two Sigma, Ribbit Capital.
- Angel Investors: Andrej Karpathy, Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Arthur Mensch (Mistral CEO), Scott Wu (Cognition CEO), Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Thiel.
Notable Investors/Partners: Stripes, Primary Venture Partners, Positive Sum, Jane Street, Hudson River Trading, Two Sigma, Ribbit Capital, VentureTech Alliance.
Growth Signals
- Headcount: 258 employees (+141% YoY growth).
- Chip successfully manufactured by TSMC in early 2026.
- $1B in customer orders already booked.
- Growing team of ex-Apple, ex-Google, ex-Nvidia, ex-Intel talent.
- 100 active job postings with high growth in hiring.

Competitive Advantages

Architecture Moat: Unlike GPUs that are general-purpose, the Sohu chip is a fixed-function ASIC that only runs transformer models. This allows it to be 10-100x more efficient on the dominant AI workload (inference) than any GPU.
First-Mover in a New Category: If transformer models remain the dominant architecture (as most experts believe), Etched has a multi-year lead in designing silicon specifically for them.
Elite Team: Founders are Harvard dropouts and Thiel Fellows. The engineering team includes top talent from Nvidia (including the architect of the HGX/DGX systems), Google (TPU team, DeepMind), Apple (iPhone silicon), Intel, and Broadcom. The team has deep experience shipping complex chips at scale.
Investor Signal: Backing from top-tier AI researchers (Hinton, Karpathy, Li) and quantitative trading firms (Jane Street, Hudson River) signals deep technical and financial credibility.

Strategic Focus

Scale Production: Moving from TSMC tape-out to volume manufacturing of the Sohu chip.
Deliver Clusters: Fulfilling the $1B order book by shipping complete inference clusters to customers.
Build the Team: Aggressively hiring across hardware (ASIC, PCB, physical design), software (inference, firmware, ML research), and operations (supply chain, finance, legal) to scale from ~250 to potentially thousands of employees.
Achieve "Gigawatt Scale": The company's internal mantra ("every decision moves us toward Gigawatt scale") indicates a focus on building infrastructure that can support massive AI workloads.

Sources

Job description

WHAT YOU’LL DO

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

Why work at Etched

Application questions