---
title: 'People Operations Generalist at Etched'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/people-operations-generalist-etched-san-jose-qgrbrkrq0kx2'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-02'
---

# People Operations Generalist 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/035cd661-6966-4ab3-a5f6-0747a2daca37

## 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 we scale, we're looking for a hands-on People Operations Generalist to own the day-to-day employee experience, from offer letter to last day, and build the systems that let it scale. This role is ideal for someone who thrives in fast-paced, high-talent-density environments and would rather fix a broken process and build systems than route tickets.

## What You'll Do

- Own the employee lifecycle end-to-end, including pre-hire, onboarding, new hire orientation, and offboarding, so hires are ready to go from day one
- Manage immigration processes for our team, partnering with outside counsel to keep cases on track
- Own Rippling as our HRIS, building workflows and reports and keeping employee data accurate
- Build and improve People systems and processes, automating repetitive work where we can
- Handle core People Ops work, from employee questions and leaves to compliance and offboarding
- Develop, implement, and maintain HR compliance programs, employee policies, and handbooks as the organization scales
- Analyze headcount, hiring, and engagement data, and turn it into clear recommendations for leadership
- Partner closely with Finance, Legal, IT, and Recruiting on cross-functional initiatives to mature company processes, policies, and operational efficiency
- Support employee recognition and team-building efforts, from celebrating wins to planning events that bring the team together
- Manage vendor relationships such as insurance and benefit brokers, including worker's compensation, legal counsel, and EORs
- Manage and support leave of absence, ADA accommodations, and employee relations related cases with care and discretion, partnering with Legal as needed
- Jump in wherever the team needs you as we grow, from new programs to one-off projects

You may be a good fit if you have

- Have 3 - 6 years of experience in People Operations, HR, or a generalist role, ideally at a fast-growing startup
- Have hands-on experience administering Rippling (or a similar HRIS), including workflows, reports, and integrations
- Have managed employment-based immigration cases (H-1B, O-1, green cards) alongside outside counsel
- Proficiency with modern workplace tools such as Jira, Slack, Ironclad, and GSuite
- Are comfortable with data and can turn a messy export into a clear report in spreadsheets
- Have working knowledge of California and federal employment law, leaves, and benefits administration
- Handle confidential information with sound judgment and discretion
- Thrive in ambiguity and enjoy building systems from scratch

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

- People Operations at a hardware, semiconductor, or AI-native company
- Supporting a team through rapid scaling, such as 500 to 1000+
- Experience with employee relations, including investigations and case management
- Global experience (APAC and/or EMEA) supporting people ops or entity
- Recruiting or ATS administration (Ashby or similar)
- Scripting, or no-code automation tools for People data and workflows
- Proficiency with leveraging AI tools such as Claude and [Harvey.ai](http://Harvey.ai)
- Equity administration (Carta or similar)

## Benefits

- Full medical, dental, and vision packages, with generous premium coverage
- Housing subsidy of $2,500/month for those living within walking distance of the office
- Daily catered lunch and dinner in our office
- Relocation support for those moving to West San Jose

## Compensation Range

- $120,000 - $200,000

## How we’re different

Etched believes in the[Bitter Lesson](http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html). We think most of the progress in the AI field has come from using more FLOPs to train and run models, and the best way to get more FLOPs is to build model-specific hardware. Larger and larger training runs encourage companies to consolidate around fewer model architectures, which creates a market for single-model ASICs. We are a fully in-person team in West San Jose, 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 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

- [Build Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/build-engineer-etched-san-jose-dmb7by4dkav7) — San Jose, CA
- [Inventory Site Lead (Milpitas)](https://feeny.ai/job/inventory-site-lead-milpitas-etched-san-jose-mzfdmk6qz5fp) — San Jose, CA
- [Strategic Buyer](https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-buyer-etched-san-jose-d8bna5vet7aw) — 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