---
title: 'Thermal /Mechanical Hybrid Engineer at Etched'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/thermal-mechanical-hybrid-engineer-etched-san-jose-qb7b2j722fz5'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-07'
---

# Thermal /Mechanical Hybrid Engineer at Etched

- **Company:** [Etched](https://feeny.ai/companies/etched)
- **Location:** San Jose, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-06-11
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-07
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/etched/845adb04-9dbe-43f5-b927-22115dea25a1/application

**Skills:** Direct-to-chip cold plate design, Water cooling systems, Thermal simulations, Mechanical engineering, Cooling system design, Thermal interface materials (TIM), GD&T, Mechanical CAD software (NX, Creo, CATIA), DFM and DFA principles, Fluent, Liquid thermal simulations, Heat exchanger design

> Lead the design and optimization of direct-to-chip cold plate modules and thermal management systems for high-performance data center products. This role requires expertise in water cooling, thermal simulations, and mechanical engineering to ensure optimal thermal performance and reliability.

## 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 experienced Thermal/Mechanical Engineer who has experience designing direct-to-chip cold plate modules to join our team and lead our efforts in optimizing thermal management for high-performance systems. You must be familiar with both the thermal and mechanical aspects of the cold plate module as well as their adjacent components such as thermal interface material (TIM). You will play a crucial role in developing and implementing advanced thermal management solutions for our high-performance data center products. Your expertise in water cooling, thermal simulations, mechanical engineering and cooling system design will be essential in ensuring optimal thermal performance and reliability.

## Key responsibilities

- Lead the in-house design and optimization of various direct-to-chip cold plate modules
- Lead the design and optimization of thermal management systems for high-performance data center products, focusing on water cooling solutions and advanced cooling concepts.
- Cover both the thermal and mechanical engineering design
- Be very familiar with the key components of a cold plate, including but not limited to pedestals, nozzles, pedestals, internal fin designs (e.g. skived fins), etc.
- Develop and implement water cooling solutions, including internal manifolds, quick disconnects, CDUs (Coolant Distribution Units), and heat exchangers. Ensure effective cooling and thermal management for high-power processors and other critical components
- Candidate must be able to run liquid thermal simulations to predict and analyze thermal performance of the heat exchanger
- Must be familiar with the mechanical design, fabrication, and mechanical assembly of the cold plate.
- Evaluate and select thermal interface materials (TIMs) for various heat sinks and cooling solutions. Optimize TIM performance to enhance thermal conductivity and heat dissipation.
- Explore and implement advanced thermal cooling concepts, including phase change cooling, liquid cooling, and other cutting-edge technologies.
- Oversee the testing and validation of thermal management systems to ensure they meet performance, reliability, and efficiency standards. Address any issues related to thermal performance and provide solutions.
- Create and maintain comprehensive documentation for thermal management designs, including design specifications, simulation results, and testing reports. Report on performance and any issues identified during testing.
- Work closely with cross-functional teams, including mechanical engineers, electrical systems engineers, and vendors, to ensure seamless integration and operation of thermal management solutions.

You maybe a good fit if you have

- A Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering or Thermal Engineering, or a related field. Advanced degrees or certifications in thermal management or related areas are highly desirable.
- A Minimum of 5 years of experience in thermal and mechanical engineering with a strong focus on water cooling systems and advanced thermal management solutions.
- Strong expertise in mechanical design
- Proven expertise in designing and managing direct-to-processor cooling systems and thermal simulations.
- Extensive experience with cold plate designs, water cooling systems, including internal manifolds, quick disconnects, CDUs, and heat exchangers
- Proficiency in mechanical tolerances and generating mechanical drawings using GD&T
- Proficiency in mechanical CAD software and tools such as NX, Creo, CATIA, or similar is required
- Apply DFM and DFA principles to optimize designs for cost-effective manufacturing, assembly, and maintenance, ensuring high efficiency and reduced production costs.
- Proven expertise in designing and managing direct-to-processor cold plate modules
- Proficiency in thermal simulation tools such as Fluent and techniques to predict and analyze thermal performance of heat exchangers
- Knowledge of various thermal interface materials (TIMs) and heat sink designs
- Experience with advanced thermal cooling concepts and technologies.

## 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 + 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

- [EE Hardware System Engineer (TW)](https://feeny.ai/job/ee-hardware-system-engineer-tw-etched-taipei-fgncym9kzy6w) — Taipei, Taiwan
- [Silicon Validation Engineer, Software](https://feeny.ai/job/silicon-validation-engineer-software-etched-san-jose-qhp3k9xqy5vr) — San Jose, CA
- [RMA & Repair Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/rma-repair-lead-etched-san-jose-q0tmchh0yyrj) — San Jose, CA
- [Advanced Packaging SI/PI Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/advanced-packaging-si-pi-engineer-etched-san-jose-47he7k0hp901) — San Jose, CA
- [Substrate IC Package Layout Design Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/substrate-ic-package-layout-design-engineer-etched-san-jose-g36wmxc8ww9r) — San Jose, CA
- [ECAD Librarian](https://feeny.ai/job/ecad-librarian-etched-san-jose-0h5kvj2cxzk4) — San Jose, CA
- [Inventory Warehouse Coordinator](https://feeny.ai/job/inventory-warehouse-coordinator-etched-san-jose-49b0bs49ce57) — San Jose, CA
- [Logistics Analyst (Taiwan)](https://feeny.ai/job/logistics-analyst-taiwan-etched-taipei-5xzc094cqgzn) — Taipei, Taiwan
- [Communications](https://feeny.ai/job/communications-etched-san-jose-3f4bdr97hysp) — San Jose, CA
- [Production Finance](https://feeny.ai/job/production-finance-etched-san-jose-qfypbv9eh0ws) — San Jose, CA