---
title: 'Mechanical Engineer at Etched'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/mechanical-engineer-etched-san-jose-42w9x3hmtqtj'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-19'
---

# Mechanical Engineer at Etched

- **Company:** [Etched](https://feeny.ai/companies/etched)
- **Location:** San Jose, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-10-19
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-19
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/etched/79b51baf-67eb-4857-a1ae-abcb649feab8

## 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 We are seeking an experienced Mechanical Engineer to join our team and help transform complex designs into reliable, high-power data center products. As a Mechanical Engineer at Etched, you will be integral to the development of high-performance data center products, from initial concept through to production. You will collaborate closely with both internal and external design engineers, including JDM (Joint Design Manufacturer) partners. Your expertise in mechanical design, particularly for data center chassis and high-power systems, will ensure our products meet rigorous performance, reliability, and manufacturability standards.

## Key Responsibilities

- Develop and refine mechanical designs for high-power data center products, ensuring robust performance and reliability. Manage the transition from appearance models to production-ready designs.
- Work closely with internal design teams and external partners, including Joint Design Manufacturers (JDMs), to ensure seamless integration of mechanical designs with overall product architecture.
- Lead the design of data center chassis and enclosures from concept through production, focusing on meeting high power, cooling efficiency, and ruggedness requirements.
- Oversee and manage the development of both soft and hard tooling to support mass production, ensuring that all tooling meets strict quality and consistency specifications.
- Ensure that mechanical designs comply with manufacturing requirements, including shock and vibration standards, to guarantee durability and performance in demanding data center environments.
- Translate industrial design concepts into manufacturable designs, effectively converting appearance models into production-ready mechanical solutions.
- Apply DFM principles to optimize designs for cost-effective manufacturing, assembly, and maintenance, ensuring high efficiency and reduced production costs.

You maybe a good fit if you have

- A Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering or a related field is essential. Advanced degrees or certifications in mechanical design or manufacturing are a plus.
- A minimum of 10 years of experience in mechanical engineering with a focus on high-power data center products, including a proven track record in designing and managing chassis and enclosures for data centers, is required.
- Strong expertise in mechanical design and engineering principles is necessary, along with hands-on experience in transforming industrial design concepts into production-ready models.
- Extensive experience in data center chassis design, with a deep understanding of high-power and cooling requirements, is important.
- Proficiency in mechanical CAD software and tools such as SolidWorks, Creo, FX, CATIA, or similar is required.
- A deep understanding of tooling processes, including both soft and hard tooling, and their impact on product design and production, is critical.
- Familiarity with manufacturing requirements and standards, including shock and vibration testing, is expected to ensure that designs are durable and meet industry expectations.
- Excellent problem-solving skills and a keen attention to detail are essential to ensure that every aspect of design work is meticulously considered.

## 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 + 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

- [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, Engineer (ASIC)](https://feeny.ai/job/internal-acceleration-engineer-asic-etched-san-jose-vknbkj44wrzn) — 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