---
title: 'Inventory Manager at Etched'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/inventory-manager-etched-taipei-gca9fe0dct6r'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-12'
---

# Inventory Manager at Etched

- **Company:** [Etched](https://feeny.ai/companies/etched)
- **Location:** Taipei, Taiwan
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-10-07
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-12
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/etched/b1f8b069-772f-49f0-8f9d-ef03c92b73b7

## 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 an Inventory Manager at Etched, you will own the end-to-end strategy, control, and execution of our contract manufacturer (CM) and 3PL inventory operations. In this role, you will lead excess and obsolescence (E&O) mitigation, champion inventory audit and reconciliation processes across global sites, and build robust dashboards to deliver high-precision visibility for leadership and Finance. Operating at the intersection of supply chain operations and financial stewardship, you will play a critical role in optimizing capital efficiency and ensuring operational rigour as Etched scales frontier AI hardware.

## Key Responsibilities

- Inventory Analysis and E&O Mitigation
- Review slow-moving and aged inventory on a regular basis to identify E&O risks, and drive timely disposition decisions in partnership with CMs and internal stakeholders.
- Analyze CM demand waterfall reports and lead deep-dive root cause analysis of E&O drivers, such as forecast changes, MOQ/lead time constraints, EOL, and engineering changes.
- Partner with CMs, suppliers, internal teams, and spot market channels to mitigate E&O exposure through supply reallocation across CMs, reuse on new programs, rework, vendor returns or cancellations, open-market resale, or scrap as a last resort.
- Inventory Audit and Control
- Coordinate with CMs and 3PL warehouses to fulfill consigned inventory requirements, and maintain complete, auditable transaction records for all inventory movements to ensure full traceability and support reconciliation.
- Conduct on-site audits and physical counts of consigned and excess inventory held at CM sites and 3PL warehouses to ensure inventory accuracy and proper control.
- Lead periodic three-way reconciliation among NetSuite, 3PL warehouse records, and CM inventory reports, and investigate and resolve any discrepancies in a timely manner.
- Reporting and Financial Partnership
- Build and maintain inventory dashboards and KPIs, including inventory turns, aging, E&O value, and inventory accuracy.
- Deliver regular inventory health reports to management with actionable recommendations to reduce E&O exposure.
- Partner with Finance on inventory valuation, E&O reserves, write-offs, and quarterly/annual audits.
- CM Build Validation and Cost Accounting Support
- Review and validate CM as-built reports for accuracy, including component consumption, build quantities, and lot/serial traceability, against BOMs and work orders.
- Reconcile CM build and consumption data to NetSuite (work orders, assembly builds, component issues) and resolve variances before month-end close.
- Validate CM invoices and charges (components, MVA/labor, and E&O claims) against agreed pricing and actual builds.
- Serve as the primary liaison between Cost Accounting and the CMs regarding BOM and cost discrepancies, scrap/yield losses.

You may be a good fit if you have (Must-have qualifications)

- 5+ years of experience in supply chain, inventory management, or material program management within electronics manufacturing or big tech.
- Proven track record of managing contract manufacturers (CMs) and 3PL warehouses, including conducting physical audits, 3-way reconciliations, and consigned inventory controls.
- Strong analytical capability to perform E&O root-cause analysis, drive inventory disposition strategies, and build inventory health dashboards/KPIs.

Strong candidates may also have experience with (Nice-to-have qualifications)

- Experience working with ERP systems such as NetSuite, SAP, or Kinaxis for inventory transaction tracking and financial reconciliation.
- Background partnering with Finance and Cost Accounting on inventory valuation, E&O reserves, and audit readiness.
- Direct experience with server rack hardware, complex electronics, or fast-paced NPI-to-production hardware environments.

## Benefits

- Competitive compensation packages, including generous equity packages
- Comprehensive insurance coverage and other top-of-market benefits

## 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 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 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/)

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