---
title: 'Test Technical Program Manager at Etched'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/test-technical-program-manager-etched-san-jose-yj9z15djagd3'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-12'
---

# Test Technical 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:** 2026-10-12
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/etched/7db7f5f0-dbb9-41c7-9fda-4a010ec6a868

## 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 Test Technical Program Manager to drive manufacturing test strategy and execution 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 hardware engineering, test engineering, manufacturing engineering, firmware, software, supply chain, and operations. You will own the program management of manufacturing test development—from early architecture and test strategy through factory deployment, production ramp, and yield optimization—ensuring every system ships with robust, scalable, and high-quality manufacturing test coverage.

## Key Responsibilities

- Drive end-to-end execution of manufacturing test programs across prototype, EVT, DVT, PVT, and mass production builds.
- Partner with hardware, firmware, software, systems, validation, and manufacturing engineering teams to define manufacturing test strategy, milestones, and deliverables.
- Coordinate development and deployment of board-level, subsystem, and system-level manufacturing test solutions across L6, L10, and L11 assemblies.
- Drive cross-functional execution to ensure manufacturing test hardware, software, fixtures, automation, and infrastructure are ready to support production milestones.
- Partner with contract manufacturers and FATP partners to deploy, validate, and scale manufacturing test processes globally.
- Track manufacturing test readiness, station bring-up, throughput, capacity, coverage, and factory deployment status for assigned programs.
- Lead cross-functional resolution of manufacturing test issues during engineering and production builds through structured root cause analysis and execution tracking.
- Drive manufacturing test yield improvements, failure analysis, retest reduction, and continuous optimization of factory test processes.
- Prepare and communicate manufacturing test status, risks, dependencies, and mitigation plans to engineering leadership and executive stakeholders.
- Travel to domestic and international manufacturing partners to support production readiness, factory bring-up, and critical builds.

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

- 7+ years of experience in hardware test engineering, with experience transitioning into a Technical Program Management role.
- Strong preference for candidates with a background in electrical, systems, validation, or test engineering who have led cross-functional hardware programs through NPI and production.
- Experience managing manufacturing test programs for complex hardware systems from development through production.
- Strong understanding of manufacturing development phases including EVT, DVT, PVT, and production ramp.
- Experience partnering closely with hardware, firmware, software, validation, and manufacturing engineering teams.
- Experience working with contract manufacturers, FATP partners, or ODM/OEM manufacturing organizations.
- Understanding of manufacturing test concepts including test coverage, station architecture, fixture development, automation, yield analysis, and failure diagnostics.
- Excellent cross-functional program management skills with the ability to coordinate engineering, manufacturing, and operations teams.
- Strong communication skills with experience presenting technical 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 developing manufacturing test for AI servers, accelerator systems, networking hardware, storage systems, or other high-performance compute platforms.
- Familiarity with board-level test, system-level test, boundary scan, functional test, burn-in, HASS/HALT, or factory automation.
- Experience with automated test equipment, test software frameworks, fixture development, or manufacturing diagnostics.
- Experience analyzing manufacturing yield, failure Pareto, and test escape data to improve product quality.
- Experience working closely with ASIC, firmware, systems, validation, reliability, or hardware engineering teams.
- Experience supporting first-generation hardware products through factory bring-up in a fast-paced startup environment.

## 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

## 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/)

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