--- title: 'Forward Deployed Systems Engineer at Etched' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-systems-engineer-etched-san-jose-s3zf8j5vd0va' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-11-02' --- # Forward Deployed Systems Engineer 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/37798f2c-d2d8-4911-bd5a-41b0f6f7c238 ## 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 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 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 - [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 - [Electricals Materials Handler (Inventory)](https://feeny.ai/job/electricals-materials-handler-inventory-etched-san-jose-6azxve93tnjp) — 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