---
title: 'Thermal Engineer, Rack Level at Etched'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/thermal-engineer-rack-level-etched-san-jose-rreg4wd4389r'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-09'
---

# Thermal Engineer, Rack Level at Etched

- **Company:** [Etched](https://feeny.ai/companies/etched)
- **Location:** San Jose, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-10-20
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-09
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Etched/4696006a-a43b-450b-95e1-6d9b55ed2665

## 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 a Thermal Engineer, Rack Level to own the thermal design and validation of Etched’s L11 rack system: the liquid-cooled racks that carry our inference hardware into customer datacenters. You will take the rack from design through deployment. That means defining how it is filled, commissioned, and brought online, validating the reference CDU systems it runs on, and serving as the technical voice on facility integration for our go-to-market team and customers. This role fits someone who has commissioned liquid cooling systems in a real datacenter and knows what goes wrong between the spec sheet and the white space. You will work closely with our tray- and module-level thermal engineers, with the mechanical, electrical, and systems teams, and with CDU and liquid-loop suppliers.

## Key Responsibilities

- Own thermal design and validation of the L11 rack system, including the rack-level liquid loop, manifolds, quick disconnects, and interfaces to facility cooling..
- Develop and document deployment, fill, and commissioning processes for liquid-cooled racks, from first fill and leak checks through bring-up at customer sites.
- Validate reference CDU systems. This includes writing and executing test plans in the lab and in the field, and qualifying CDU partners on thermal performance, reliability, and controls.
- Characterize rack-level thermal and hydraulic performance (flow distribution, pressure drop, supply and return temperatures) and use the results to drive design decisions.
- Define and validate cooling-loop control strategies and how they interact with datacenter facility control systems.
- Support GTM and customers as the technical point of contact on facility integration questions, such as facility water requirements, CDU selection and sizing, secondary loop design, and water quality.
- Partner with tray and module (L6–L10) thermal engineers so that server-level designs meet rack-level and facility constraints.
- Create and maintain rack thermal specifications, commissioning procedures, validation reports, and customer-facing facility requirements documents.
- Investigate and resolve thermal and fluid-related issues in the lab and in deployed systems.

You may be a good fit if you have

- 5–10 years of experience in thermal or mechanical engineering with direct, hands-on CDU and datacenter liquid cooling experience.
- Experience installing, commissioning, or validating liquid cooling systems at datacenter scale.
- Experience with CDU validation and commissioning, including flow, pressure, temperature, and controls testing.
- Strong working knowledge of datacenter cooling loops (facility water and technology cooling system / secondary loops) and the control systems that run them.
- Comfort working directly with customers, facility teams, and suppliers to resolve integration issues.
- A Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering, Thermal Engineering, or a related field.

## Nice to have

- Experience deploying rack-scale direct-to-chip liquid cooling for AI or HPC systems at a hyperscaler, server OEM, or CDU vendor.
- Familiarity with industry guidelines for datacenter liquid cooling, such as OCP and ASHRAE TC 9.9.
- Experience with 1D flow network or system-level thermal/hydraulic modeling tools (e.g., Flownex, MacroFlow).
- Knowledge of coolant chemistry, filtration, leak detection, and fluid integrity testing.

## 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

Compensation Range: $200,000 - $350,000 with significant 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 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

- [Electrical Engineer - Next Gen Development  (TW)](https://feeny.ai/job/electrical-engineer-next-gen-development-tw-etched-taipei-1p5eavhnv899) — Taipei, Taiwan
- [Infrastructure Engineering & Projects Intern](https://feeny.ai/job/infrastructure-engineering-projects-intern-etched-san-jose-nex7pv255w2v) — San Jose, CA
- [Site Reliability Engineer - Fleet Command & Control](https://feeny.ai/job/site-reliability-engineer-fleet-command-control-etched-san-jose-q5m27r8np5cv) — San Jose, CA
- [IA Research Engineer Intern](https://feeny.ai/job/ia-research-engineer-intern-etched-san-jose-vhnrfnhzby7x) — San Jose, CA
- [Chip Simulation Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/chip-simulation-lead-etched-san-jose-6d9bt85ms6tx) — San Jose, CA
- [Build Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/build-engineer-etched-san-jose-zmxm6znacgm1) — San Jose, CA
- [Inventory Site Lead (Milpitas)](https://feeny.ai/job/inventory-site-lead-milpitas-etched-san-jose-n83f9gpfm42w) — San Jose, CA
- [Strategic Buyer](https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-buyer-etched-san-jose-e9vh7zjgpwv0) — San Jose, CA
- [People Operations Generalist](https://feeny.ai/job/people-operations-generalist-etched-san-jose-mct9adxz70g2) — San Jose, CA
- [Manufacturing Operations Program Manager (Taiwan)](https://feeny.ai/job/manufacturing-operations-program-manager-taiwan-etched-taoyuan-a7vyayy8zrh7) — Taoyuan, Taiwan