Etched

General Application at Etched (San Jose, CA)

Etched· San Jose, CA·

Role details

Work type
Onsite
Employment
Full-Time
Benefits

Medical, Dental, And Vision Packages With Generous Premium Coverage · $500 Per Month Credit For Waiving Medical Benefits · Housing Subsidy Of $2k Per Month For Those Living Within Walking Distance Of The Office · Relocation Support For Those Moving To San Jose · Various Wellness Benefits Covering Fitness, Mental Health, And More · Daily Lunch And Dinner In Our Office · Unlimited Compute Budget Subject To ROI Justification

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

Etched is seeking unconventional thinkers and builders to join their team in San Jose. The role involves contributing to hardware and software development for frontier intelligence, focusing on inference workloads and model-specific hardware.

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

Exceptional companies are built by exceptional people. We’ve found that exceptional people don’t always fit neatly into pre-defined job descriptions.

If you're excited about what we're building and have a clear vision for how you could create an outsized impact at Etched, we'd love to hear from you. Tell us what you'd work on, why it matters, and why you're uniquely suited to do it.

We’re looking for unconventional thinkers, builders, and problem-solvers. If that's you, introduce yourself. We’ll make room.

Benefits

  • Medical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage
  • $500 per month credit for waiving medical benefits
  • Housing subsidy of $2k 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 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 and Taipei, 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 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