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 highly motivated and detail-oriented software engineers to join our chip simulation team. We’re building custom AI inference chips that leverage tight hardware-software co-design to deliver world-best performance. The chip simulation team plays a key role in hardware-software co-design, enabling early development of the full software stack. As an engineer on this team, you will design, develop, and test simulations of our custom hardware. You will be working at the cutting edge of hardware innovation.
Key responsibilities
Design, develop, and maintain simulations of our hardware. Ensuring high levels of accuracy, efficient debugging, and optimal performance.
Influence architectural decisions through review and co-design
Create and maintain test plans, work with hardware teams to validate their documentation.
Build tools to debug simulations, and enable developers to debug software running on the simulator.
You may be a good fit if you have
Proficiency in C/C++
Strong understanding of low-level software engineering.
Strong understanding of hardware engineering.
Excellent communication and collaboration skills.
Strong candidates may also have experience with (Nice-to-have qualifications)
Experience developing hardware or system simulations (e.g., SystemC, gem5, QEMU, or custom frameworks).
Experience with custom ML hardware accelerators (e.g., Google TPU)
Experience with firmware, kernel and driver development (e.g., Linux, FreeRTOS)
Experience with hardware development and verification.
Experience with multiprocessing and multithreading.
Familiarity with bit-accurate numerics modeling.
Experience with performance profiling and optimization of simulation code
Proficiency with Python for test harness development, bazel, and git.
Representative projects
Implement a simulation of our on-chip modules.
Integrate simulated chips with simulated hosts (QEMU), enabling Kernel driver development and host software testing.
Integrate multiple simulated chips to validate multi-chip software scale-out and scale-up approaches.
Work closely with our software teams in debugging early software deliverables.
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. 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.
Skills Required
- Proficiency in C/C++
- Strong understanding of low-level software engineering
- Strong understanding of hardware engineering
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills
- Experience developing hardware or system simulations, such as SystemC, gem5, QEMU, or custom frameworks
- Experience with custom machine learning hardware accelerators, such as Google TPU
- Experience with firmware, kernel, and driver development, such as Linux or FreeRTOS
- Experience with hardware development and verification
- Experience with multiprocessing and multithreading
- Familiarity with bit-accurate numerics modeling
- Experience with performance profiling and optimization of simulation code
- Proficiency with Python for test harness development, Bazel, and Git
Etched Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Etched and has not been reviewed or approved by Etched.
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Equity Value & Accessibility — Equity growth is described as strong and significant equity is part of the package. High total compensation for technical roles reinforces the equity-led upside.
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Healthcare Strength — Medical, dental, and vision coverage include generous premium support, indicating robust core healthcare. This reduces employee cost exposure for essential coverage.
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Wellbeing & Lifestyle Benefits — Daily lunch and dinner, a housing subsidy for those living near the office, relocation support, and wellness perks are highlighted. These offerings lower day-to-day living costs and support practical wellbeing.
Etched Insights
What We Do
By burning the transformer architecture into our chips, we’re creating the world’s most powerful servers for transformer inference.
