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

Etched's infrastructure spans some of the most sensitive compute environments in the industry: bare-metal HPC clusters running proprietary ASIC workloads, hybrid on-prem/cloud deployments, and internal toolchains that house irreplaceable chip design IP. As we scale from early silicon to production, securing these environments is foundational — not an afterthought.

As our first dedicated Network Security Engineer, you will own the design and implementation of Etched's network security posture end to end. You'll work alongside the infrastructure team to harden our physical and virtual networks, enforce least-privilege access to chip design environments, and build the detection and response capabilities that keep our most sensitive assets safe.

This is a high-ownership role for someone who wants to shape security architecture at a company building the compute infrastructure for the next decade of AI — not maintain someone else's stack.

Key Responsibilities

Design and implement a zero-trust network architecture across on-prem datacenters, multiple office locations, and multi-cloud platforms, including secure remote access that eliminates VPN sprawl without sacrificing engineer usability and speed
Define and enforce network segmentation policies that isolate sensitive ASIC development workflows from general infrastructure, customer access, validation labs, and manufacturing infrastructure
Balancing prevention and detection, deploy, tune, and operate NDR, IDS/IPS, and next-generation firewalls across our physical and virtual network fabric; build automation to continuously assess and enforce firewall rules, ACLs, and routing policies - treating network security configuration as code
Integrate and operate EDR/XDR, MDM/MAM, SASE, and CASB tooling in partnership with end-user and IT teams, enforcing unified DLP policies and device compliance posture across endpoint, cloud, and network control planes to eliminate data exfiltration risk
Own our vulnerability management process for network-layer exposure: scanning, prioritization, and remediation tracking in partnership with infrastructure engineers
Lead incident response for network-layer security events: detection, containment, root-cause analysis, and post-incident hardening
Partner with legal, compliance, and leadership to support regulatory requirements and customer security reviews as they arise

Architect and deploy network segmentation for our HPC clusters, isolating EDA tool traffic, ASIC simulation workloads, and CI pipelines from each other and from the corporate network
Architect and deploy a ZTNA-based corporate network that eliminates VPN sprawl and ensures end-user devices maintain a consistent security posture and seamless access to sensitive development environments - whether engineers are on-site, remote, or traveling - replacing location-dependent trust with continuous identity and device health verification
Design and implement a scalable NDR pipeline that ingests flow data across bare-metal switches and cloud VPCs, feeds a centralized SIEM, and generates actionable alerts with low false-positive rates
Develop runbooks and automated playbooks for the highest-probability incident scenarios - credential compromise, lateral movement, and exfiltration from IP-sensitive environments
Integrate EDR/XDR telemetry with SASE enforcement and CASB inline controls to build a unified DLP detection and response pipeline spanning endpoints, cloud SaaS, and the corporate network
Partner with end-user and IT teams to roll out MDM/MAM policies that containerize sensitive IP on engineer devices and enforce compliance-based conditional access across managed and unmanaged environments

You may be a good fit if you have (Must-have qualifications)

Bring deep, broad networking expertise - from low-level packet analysis and firewall log forensics to BGP configuration, multi-cloud networking, and CASB/SASE integration across a diverse SaaS landscape
Have hands-on experience with the Fortinet ecosystem - firewalls, FortiSASE, FortiAPs, and switches - and are comfortable with Arista switch platforms, including configuration, EOS automation, and integration into a broader security architecture
Treat security as an engineering discipline: you write code and automation rather than relying on point-and-click tooling, version-control your configurations, and develop intent-driven network automation
Have experience securing high-value compute environments - datacenters, HPC clusters, semiconductor design environments, or similar settings where the cost of a breach is extremely high
Have deployed and integrated EDR/XDR, MDM/MAM, SASE, and CASB tooling, and understand how to stitch them together into a unified DLP and access control framework that spans endpoints, cloud, and the network
Have built or operated ZTNA-based access models and understand how to enforce consistent security posture across on-site, remote, and traveling users without degrading the experience for engineers
Are comfortable owning your domain with minimal oversight: you can independently scope a project, identify the right tooling, and drive it to completion
Have strong Linux fundamentals and understand how OS-level networking (iptables/nftables, network namespaces, eBPF) interacts with physical and virtual network security controls
Have built or operated network security monitoring at scale - you know the difference between a good alert and noise, and you can architect a detection pipeline that surfaces real signal
Can communicate risk clearly to both technical peers and non-technical leadership, and can translate security requirements into actionable infrastructure changes

Strong candidates may also have experience with (Nice-to-have qualifications)

Experience with EDA environments or semiconductor IP security
Familiarity with cloud-native network security controls on AWS, GCP, or Azure (security groups, VPC flow logs, cloud firewalls, CSPM)
Background in or exposure to NIST, SOC 2, or ISO 27001 frameworks
Experience with eBPF-based network observability and security tooling

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 and 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, 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.