Hardware Applications Engineer

About Etched

Etched is building AI chips that are hard-coded for individual model architectures. Our first product (Sohu) only supports transformers, but has an order of magnitude more throughput and lower latency than a B200. With Etched ASICs, you can build products that would be impossible with GPUs, like real-time video generation models and extremely deep & parallel chain-of-thought reasoning agents.

Job Summary

As a Hardware Applications Engineer, you’ll be on the frontlines of customer success, providing hands-on technical guidance, documentation, and in-field support to help customers deploy and maintain high-performance AI systems—from single-node bring-up to full-rack installations. This role is deeply cross-functional and critical to the success of customer engagements across system hardware, software, and operational readiness.

Key responsibilities

• Serve as the primary technical liaison for customer deployments, providing hands-on system and rack-level integration support.

• Diagnose and resolve system-level issues across hardware, firmware, software, and power/network interfaces.

• Lead debugging and resolution efforts for critical RMA issues, collaborating with electrical engineering, platform, and software teams.

• Manage internal escalation processes to ensure timely resolution of complex engineering challenges.

• Develop comprehensive customer-facing documentation, including:

  • System and rack integration guides with environmental, power, and thermal requirements.

  • Instructions for executing burn-in tests, diagnostics, and validation workflows.

  • Step-by-step procedures for Customer-Replaceable Units (CRUs), hardware maintenance, and firmware updates.

  • Guidelines for customer-driven software, firmware, and hardware upgrades.

  • Troubleshooting workflows and support FAQs.

• Participate in on-site system bring-up, validation, and troubleshooting at customer sites (primarily U.S.-based).

• Support rack installation and system readiness verification.

• Assist in the deployment and validation of diagnostic and monitoring tools with internal teams.

• Work closely with hardware, software, firmware, and manufacturing teams to ensure customer issues are fully understood and efficiently resolved.

• Capture and relay structured customer feedback to inform product improvements and support strategies.

• Contribute to the development of internal tools and automation to enhance team productivity.

You may be a good fit if you have

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field.

• 3–8 years in hardware applications, systems validation, field engineering, or customer-facing technical roles—preferably in semiconductors, servers, or AI systems.

• Strong knowledge of system-level hardware, including power delivery, thermal management, PCIe, memory, and networking.

• Experience with diagnostic tools (oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, power meters, etc.) and Linux system bring-up.

• Excellent technical writing and customer communication skills.

• Experience with rack-scale deployment or data center hardware integration.

• Familiarity with firmware (BMC, BIOS), diagnostics, and software update workflow

• Willingness and ability to travel >50%, primarily to U.S. customer sites.

Benefits

• Full medical, dental, and vision packages, with generous premium coverage

• Housing subsidy of $2,000/month for those living within walking distance of the office

• Daily lunch and dinner in our office

• Relocation support for those moving to West San Jose

Compensation Range

• $150,000 - $250,000 

How we’re different

Etched believes in the Bitter Lesson. We think most of the progress in the AI field has come from using more FLOPs to train and run models, and the best way to get more FLOPs is to build model-specific hardware. Larger and larger training runs encourage companies to consolidate around fewer model architectures, which creates a market for single-model ASICs.

We are a fully in-person team in West San Jose, 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 as needed.