---
title: 'Manufacturing Design Program Manager at Etched'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/manufacturing-design-program-manager-etched-san-jose-2jq14zgvfzt6'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-07'
---

# Manufacturing Design Program Manager at Etched

- **Company:** [Etched](https://feeny.ai/companies/etched)
- **Location:** San Jose, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-07-23
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-07
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/etched/74709ee1-a4a4-4acf-9e7e-b4f9babdc481

## 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

Etched is seeking a Manufacturing Design Program Manager to drive technical manufacturing readiness across new product introduction and mass production for our transformer-specific AI systems. This highly cross-functional individual contributor role sits at the intersection of design engineering, test engineering, SMT, FATP, supply chain, and operations. You will lead manufacturing execution from early design-for-manufacturing (DFM) reviews through production ramp, ensuring products are designed for manufacturability and successfully transitioned into high-volume production.

## Key Responsibilities

- Drive manufacturing technical readiness across NPI and mass production in close partnership with hardware design, test engineering, SMT engineering, FATP process engineering, supply chain, and operations teams.
- Lead DFM reviews across L6, L10, and L11 assemblies, identifying manufacturability risks, integration challenges, and process constraints early in the product development cycle.
- Own manufacturing readiness for assigned programs, tracking build readiness, factory execution, process capability, yield, schedule, and key manufacturing risks.
- Coordinate cross-functional execution across prototype, EVT, DVT, PVT, and production builds, ensuring manufacturing deliverables remain on schedule.
- Partner with contract manufacturers and supply chain teams to develop production plans, line bring-up schedules, tooling readiness, and factory ramp strategies.
- Drive issue resolution during engineering and production builds through structured root cause analysis and cross-functional coordination.
- Monitor manufacturing KPIs including yield, cycle time, quality, and factory readiness while driving continuous improvement initiatives.
- Prepare and communicate manufacturing status, risks, mitigation plans, and execution updates to engineering leadership and executive stakeholders.
- Partner closely with design engineering to ensure manufacturing considerations are incorporated throughout the product development lifecycle.
- Travel to domestic and international manufacturing partners as needed to support production readiness and critical builds.

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

- 7+ years of experience in hardware engineering, with experience transitioning into Technical Program Management, Design Program Management, or Manufacturing Program Management.
- Strong preference for candidates with a background in mechanical, electrical, systems, or manufacturing engineering who have led cross-functional hardware programs through NPI and production.
- Experience managing manufacturing readiness for complex electromechanical systems or high-performance compute hardware.
- Strong understanding of manufacturing development phases including EVT, DVT, PVT, and production ramp.
- Experience leading DFM reviews and partnering closely with hardware engineering throughout product development.
- Experience working directly with contract manufacturers, FATP partners, or ODM/OEM manufacturing operations.
- Excellent cross-functional program management skills with the ability to coordinate engineering, manufacturing, supply chain, and operations teams.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with experience driving manufacturing issue resolution.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including presenting program status, risks, and tradeoffs to senior leadership.
- Willingness to work in-person from our San Jose office and travel internationally to manufacturing partners as needed.

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

Experience building AI servers, accelerator systems, networking hardware, storage systems, or other high-performance compute platforms.

Familiarity with SMT manufacturing, factory operations, automated test systems, or final system integration.

Experience with manufacturing yield analytics, SPC methodologies, process capability metrics, or manufacturing data systems.

Experience with liquid-cooled systems, advanced packaging, or high-density compute platforms.

Experience partnering closely with ASIC, systems, thermal, reliability, or validation engineering teams.

Experience working in fast-paced startup environments bringing first-generation hardware products into production.

## 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 http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/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 (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

- [EE Hardware System Engineer (TW)](https://feeny.ai/job/ee-hardware-system-engineer-tw-etched-taipei-fgncym9kzy6w) — Taipei, Taiwan
- [Silicon Validation Engineer, Software](https://feeny.ai/job/silicon-validation-engineer-software-etched-san-jose-qhp3k9xqy5vr) — San Jose, CA
- [RMA & Repair Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/rma-repair-lead-etched-san-jose-q0tmchh0yyrj) — San Jose, CA
- [Advanced Packaging SI/PI Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/advanced-packaging-si-pi-engineer-etched-san-jose-47he7k0hp901) — San Jose, CA
- [Substrate IC Package Layout Design Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/substrate-ic-package-layout-design-engineer-etched-san-jose-g36wmxc8ww9r) — San Jose, CA
- [ECAD Librarian](https://feeny.ai/job/ecad-librarian-etched-san-jose-0h5kvj2cxzk4) — San Jose, CA
- [Inventory Warehouse Coordinator](https://feeny.ai/job/inventory-warehouse-coordinator-etched-san-jose-49b0bs49ce57) — San Jose, CA
- [Logistics Analyst (Taiwan)](https://feeny.ai/job/logistics-analyst-taiwan-etched-taipei-5xzc094cqgzn) — Taipei, Taiwan
- [Communications](https://feeny.ai/job/communications-etched-san-jose-3f4bdr97hysp) — San Jose, CA
- [Production Finance](https://feeny.ai/job/production-finance-etched-san-jose-qfypbv9eh0ws) — San Jose, CA