Feeny
Etched

Forward Deployed Systems Engineer at Etched (San Jose, CA)

Etched· San Jose, CA·

Role details

Work type
Onsite
Employment
Full-Time

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

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 As a Forward Deployed Systems Engineer (Datacenter), you will work hands-on in large-scale datacenter environments to bring up, validate, and debug Etched accelerator-based systems. You’ll own customer deployment execution end-to-end, solve complex hardware/software/networking issues under real-world constraints, and build the tooling and processes that make deployments scalable and repeatable.

Key Responsibilities

Technical problem solving & diagnostics

  • Drive deployments with customers and internal teams to identify risks and establish success criteria
  • Debug and resolve system-level issues across hardware, firmware, drivers, Linux OS, and networking stacks
  • Perform root-cause analysis on field issues and partner with internal engineering teams to reproduce issues and ship fixes
  • Build and maintain diagnostics, monitoring/telemetry, and dashboards to improve visibility into system health

Firmware & system updates

  • Coordinate firmware updates, hotfixes, and configuration changes to improve reliability and unblock customer deployments
  • Manage update rollouts with minimal downtime and clear communication to customers and internal teams

Documentation & knowledge management

  • Create and maintain deployment runbooks, escalation playbooks, known-issues documentation, and field service guides
  • Capture structured learnings from deployments and convert them into repeatable processes

Cross-functional collaboration

  • Partner with firmware/software/hardware engineering teams to drive reliability improvements
  • Collaborate with Deployment, RMA, Sustaining Engineering, and Support teams to ensure smooth handoffs and long-term supportability

Process improvement & scaling

  • Improve deployment workflows, metrics, and best practices to reduce deployment risk, time, and cost
  • Identify patterns across deployments and drive process/tooling improvements that scale across customers

You may be a good fit if you have

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience)
  • Experience supporting datacenter customers in systems, networking, AI infrastructure, or field engineering roles
  • Deep experience with Linux/Unix installation, configuration, debugging, and performance tuning
  • Strong networking fundamentals including TCP/IP, RDMA, and low-latency Ethernet Hands-on experience with high-speed networking such as 100GbE / 400GbE
  • Strong ability to diagnose performance and integration issues across hardware + OS + networking layers BMC experience, telemetry/monitoring systems, RMA/failure analysis exposure
  • Travel up to 30% to customer sites for deployments, on-site debugging, and launch support

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 theBitter Lesson. 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.

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