About Etched
Etched is building the world’s first AI inference system purpose-built for transformers - delivering over 10x higher performance and dramatically lower cost and 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. 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're hiring an Operations Lead to serve as a high-impact business partner embedded within one Platform Engineering Team. This person will be responsible for helping the department function like a high-performing startup within a startup, with clear goals, smooth execution, and strong internal alignment.
The role blends strategy, operational design, planning discipline, and execution. You'll work closely with our VP of Platform Engineering to ensure hiring, budgeting, performance tracking, and quarterly execution all run at the speed and precision required for first-of-its-kind hardware.
This is not a project manager, EA, or Chief of Staff role. You will be a critical part of how Etched’s most important technical bets are made and executed.
Key responsibilities
Own quarterly and annual planning rhythms for the Platform team, including objective-setting, milestone tracking, and cross-functional coordination
Lead strategic projects that align departmental objectives to broader business needs
Track and manage budgets, vendor relationships, and operational overhead while ensuring technical teams remain focused and unblocked
Provide operational visibility and context to our executive team, ensuring high-quality communication across engineering and business functions
Work closely with the Platform team to develop MBR, QBR, and Board readiness material
Manage departmental hiring plans, recruiting execution, and offer processes in partnership with functional leaders and talent teams
Collaborate with supply chain and platform teams to manage early engineering risk buys.
Work with Finance and Platform teams to align demand forecasts for platform solutions.
Partner with engineering leads on org design, performance systems, and headcount strategy to ensure teams are scaling effectively
You may be a good fit if you have
5-8 years of experience in business operations, engineering operations, or technical program roles in fast-paced environments
Operations Strategy, Business Operations, or seasoned Chief of Staff background at Tier 1 startups or technical companies
Experience designing and managing complex, high-stakes timelines with cross-functional dependencies
High trust with senior engineers and executives, with the ability to influence without authority and drive decisions forward
Strong aptitude for learning new software tools and building internal systems (strong spreadsheet and modeling skills are a plus)
A bachelor’s degree in engineering or a related technical field, or equivalent technical fluency and credibility
Strong candidates may also have experience with
Driving recruiting results including sourcing strategy, comp design, and offer negotiation
Running performance review processes and org design projects in engineering-heavy orgs
Budget management and vendor contract oversight for R&D-focused departments
Working closely with technical founders or executives in an early or growth-stage company
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
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.
Top Skills
What We Do
By burning the transformer architecture into our chips, we’re creating the world’s most powerful servers for transformer inference.
