---
title: 'Thermal Lab Lead at Etched'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/thermal-lab-lead-etched-san-jose-64z9mrsy3jke'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-09'
---

# Thermal Lab Lead 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:** 2026-11-09
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Etched/c5c989ba-020e-4690-a14b-1f5cf85219ba

## 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 highly motivated person to join our team as Thermal Lab Lead where you will help build and maintain a world class thermal lab to support the testing of all the thermal assemblies of our high-performance data center products. You will play a key role in the development lifecycle of Etched products, interfacing with engineers and enabling the testing and validation of cutting edge thermal designs. You will also work closely with lab operations on future lab build outs and deployment of CDUs and liquid cooled racks. You will interface with thermal technicians, plan, and delegate tests to meet aggressive timelines. This position requires very high hands-on ownership, attention to detail, and excellent organizational skills to support continuous high speed growth.

## Key responsibilities

- Lead day-to-day thermal lab operations, including test benches, equipment, and consumables inventory.
- Develop test plans and procedures in partnership with thermal engineering.
- Own test setup, instrumentation, execution, data-quality review, and reporting against agreed objectives and acceptance criteria.
- Develop, maintain, and validate automation tools for test execution, data acquisition, and data reduction and analysis.
- Coordinate testing requests across multiple teams, establish priorities with stakeholders, and forecast equipment, capacity, and staffing bottlenecks.
- Lead thermal technicians, assign testing activities, provide technical guidance, and review completed work.
- Maintain lab procedures and coordinate equipment maintenance, calibration, and safe operating practices with lab operations.
- Partner with lab operations to plan future lab capabilities, equipment, and infrastructure.
- Assist with the installation, integration, and commissioning of primary and secondary cooling loops in partnership with facilities, lab operations, equipment vendors, and qualified contractors.
- Assemble thermal test vehicles, including wiring and soldering of PCBs and heaters.
- Commission CDUs and liquid-cooled racks to support lab testing.
- Assist in the design and buildout of Etched thermal labs in Taiwan.

You may be a good fit if you have

- Relevant technical education—such as an associate’s degree, technical diploma, or bachelor’s degree in engineering, engineering technology, mechatronics, instrumentation, or a related field—or equivalent hands-on experience.
- Hands-on experience testing single-phase liquid-cooled assemblies, including cold plates, manifolds, quick disconnects, and CDUs.
- Experience selecting, installing, and troubleshooting instrumentation such as flowmeters, thermocouples, and pressure transducers, as well as operating chillers and liquid-cooling test equipment.
- Demonstrated ability to independently build and troubleshoot test setups, assess measurement quality, and document reliable results.
- Working knowledge of heat transfer and fluid flow sufficient to interpret test results and troubleshoot thermal-fluid systems.
- Experience developing, debugging, and validating test automation and data-analysis workflows.
- Experience coordinating competing testing priorities and providing technical direction to technicians.
- Excellent organizational and documentation skills.

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification.

## 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, 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