---
title: 'Inventory Site Lead (Milpitas) at Etched'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/inventory-site-lead-milpitas-etched-san-jose-mzfdmk6qz5fp'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-02'
---

# Inventory Site Lead (Milpitas) at Etched

- **Company:** [Etched](https://feeny.ai/companies/etched)
- **Location:** San Jose, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-10-29
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-02
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/etched/fd1040b0-a119-4681-8a3b-acc1a7a7daa9

## 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 The Inventory Site Lead owns inventory for Milpitas, supporting production, our engineering labs and our contract manufacturers. You'll supervise the Milpitas Inventory team (receiving, warehouse coordinators and material handlers) and own the accuracy of every record: what is on hand, where it is, what it is allocated to, and what has left the building. You'll work closely with the SMT line, Procurement, Engineering and Finance. This is a working-lead role: you set the standard, build the processes, and are on the floor hands on when a count, a receipt or an investigation needs your hands.

## Key Responsibilities

- Team leadership: Supervise the Milpitas Inventory team: set daily priorities, own shift coverage and scheduling (including the swing shift), train new coordinators on SOPs and equipment, and lead hands on alongside the team.
- Receiving and material handling: Own receiving in NetSuite/ERP end to end: loading-dock pickup, inspection, verification of quantities and part information against POs and packing lists, lot and date-code capture, labeling, put-away and routing to lab, storage or build areas. Resolve receipt discrepancies same day with Supply Chain, Logistics and Engineering. Oversee packaging and outbound shipments.
- Inventory control: Maintain accurate on-hand, allocated, in-transit and consigned-at-CM balances. Run the cycle-count program. Investigate every variance to root cause (receipt, transaction, kitting, scrap or physical), correct the record, and close the process gap so it does not recur.
- Kitting and internal fulfillment: Make sure kits for in-house and CM builds are complete, to the released BOM revision, and staged on time. Be the escalation point for engineers requesting parts, tools, equipment and supplies, and make sure the team picks, stages and distributes material for builds and testing without delay. Flag shortages and substitutions before they stop a build.
- Warehouse operations and safety: Keep lab and warehouse spaces clean, safe and organized. Own the ESD, 5S and safety programs, including handling requirements for ESD-sensitive, fragile and high-value parts. Oversee forklift (8,000 lb), pallet-jack and cart use and keep the team trained and certified. Coordinate material movement between Etched facilities.
- Processes: Write and maintain the SOPs for receiving, put-away, transfers, consignment, RMA, return-to-stock and scrap. Identify and drive improvements to labeling, storage systems and material flow.
- Scaling: Plan space, staffing and systems for higher volumes and additional production lines.

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

- Minimum of three years of experience in inventory or warehouse operations in a manufacturing or electronics environment.
- Hands-on experience with SAP, NetSuite or a comparable ERP for receiving, transfers, cycle counts and inventory adjustments.
- Experience managing inventory and leading a team: setting priorities, scheduling, training and holding a standard.
- Proficient in Excel: lookups, pivot tables and building a clean weekly report from transaction data.
- Experience running cycle-count programs and investigating variances to root cause.
- Strong communication skills and ability to coordinate closely with Engineering, Supply Chain and Operations teams.
- Comfortable on the floor: ESD-controlled areas, lifting up to 50 lb, and standing for extended periods.
- Valid driver's license and reliable transportation between San Jose and Milpitas.

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

- Exposure to electronics manufacturing (SMT/PCBA), including MSD and ESD handling.
- Experience managing consigned or customer-furnished material at contract manufacturers.
- Prior lab or warehouse experience in a semiconductor or hardware environment.
- Experience supporting inventory audits or compliance processes.
- Familiarity with startup operations or fast-paced R&D cycles.
- Forklift certification (training on our 8,000 lb forklift will be provided).

## 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

## Compensation Range

- $120,000 - $150,000 annually, plus equity

## 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 this role is based at our site in Milpitas. We do not have boundaries between teams, and we expect everyone to work across disciplines as needed. As set forth in Etched's Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

## 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
- [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
- [Forward Deployed Systems Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-systems-engineer-etched-san-jose-s3zf8j5vd0va) — 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