--- title: 'Internal Acceleration, Engineer (ASIC) at Etched' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/internal-acceleration-engineer-asic-etched-san-jose-vknbkj44wrzn' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-10-19' --- # Internal Acceleration, Engineer (ASIC) at Etched - **Company:** [Etched](https://feeny.ai/companies/etched) - **Location:** San Jose, CA - **Compensation:** $150k–$400k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-10-15 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-19 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/etched/e88d1367-9166-4a00-b450-f194163c7225 ## Job description Job Summary Our Internal Acceleration team’s mandate is to build agents to accelerate the production of frontier tokens. You’ll work directly with our founders and embed with our ASIC team to build new agentic harnesses and operating systems to transform the way hardware is built in an AI native world. Your work will vary widely, and your success is measured by how much faster Etched moves, not by the lines of code you write. This role is for engineers who thrive on ambiguity, have real product sense, and want to own problems end to end. It’s a whiteboard for future founders. The problems we solve are time-sensitive and business-critical. This role will not be a 9-5, and the ideal candidate is excited about that. You may be a good fit if you - Have at least 1-5+ years of experience building and shipping software end to end, ideally at a fast-moving startup - Have strong full-stack skills. We care less about whether you write every line yourself and more about whether what you ship works - Have built LLM agents or AI tooling that real users depend on, which means more than calling an API: context engineering, tool integration, evals, and failure analysis - Use AI to ramp fast on unfamiliar domains. Agentic coding tools and frontier models are how you work, not an add-on - Have product sense, design taste, and extreme attention to detail - Have extreme agency: you find the real problem, not just the stated one ## Key Responsibilities - Embed with our ASIC team to find the highest-leverage bottlenecks, and own each one from first idea to a tool engineers rely on every day. - Build and deploy LLM agents wired into our engineering workflows via tool-calling and MCP. - Ship full-stack internal products from zero to one: the interfaces, data pipelines, and infrastructure that define how Etched builds. - Measure what works. Design evals and track adoption so we double down on the tools that matter and kill the ones that don’t. - Take on special projects directly with the founders, surfacing problems across the company and doing whatever it takes to hit critical milestones. Strong candidates may also have - Exposure to chip development, kernels, hardware, or manufacturing. - Infrastructure, data engineering, or DevOps experience - Fine-tuning, RAG over proprietary technical data, or multi-agent orchestration - Startup experience, especially through hypergrowth ## 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 Base Compensation Range - $150K – $400K+ - Plus Significant Equity ## How we’re different Etched believes in the Bitter 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. ## 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. ## 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 - [Mechanical Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/mechanical-engineer-etched-san-jose-42w9x3hmtqtj) — San Jose, CA - [Internal Acceleration, Research Engineer (Production)](https://feeny.ai/job/internal-acceleration-research-engineer-production-etched-san-jose-sqbyj2amhpjg) — San Jose, CA - [Internal Acceleration, Research Engineer (Hardware)](https://feeny.ai/job/internal-acceleration-research-engineer-hardware-etched-san-jose-tj3zyra40ktt) — San Jose, CA - [Internal Acceleration, Research Engineer (ASIC)](https://feeny.ai/job/internal-acceleration-research-engineer-asic-etched-san-jose-b9edwhnn0z7v) — San Jose, CA - [Internal Acceleration, Engineer (Special Projects)](https://feeny.ai/job/internal-acceleration-engineer-special-projects-etched-san-jose-1dwjbp016bhc) — San Jose, CA - [Internal Acceleration, Engineer (Production)](https://feeny.ai/job/internal-acceleration-engineer-production-etched-san-jose-a54mtqn5e9zy) — San Jose, CA - [Internal Acceleration, Engineer (Hardware)](https://feeny.ai/job/internal-acceleration-engineer-hardware-etched-san-jose-w98ba6ngtm3d) — San Jose, CA - [Internal Acceleration, Research Engineer (Kernels)](https://feeny.ai/job/internal-acceleration-research-engineer-kernels-etched-san-jose-mvmvzpbtyfg3) — San Jose, CA - [Internal Acceleration, Engineer (Kernels)](https://feeny.ai/job/internal-acceleration-engineer-kernels-etched-san-jose-x8xw3xpxxpzr) — San Jose, CA - [Production Line Supervisor](https://feeny.ai/job/production-line-supervisor-etched-san-jose-k5d7ks7nyvd0) — San Jose, CA