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

Etched is building at-scale AI systems that will unlock faster, more efficient inference for billions of people, and the Supercomputing team is critical in enabling this mission. We are seeking a highly skilled and motivated Engineer to join our Supercomputing team to help build the foundational software that powers our cluster-scale AI compute deployments. This role on the core team involves the development, integration, and debugging of critical system components, including on control-plane software, system bring-up, telemetry, orchestration primitives, and performance tuning at the hardware–software boundary.

Key Responsibilities

Architect and implement low-level control-plane software responsible for system bring-up, configuration, and management of cluster-scale AI compute deployments
Build system services that interact directly with hardware, firmware, and the operating system
Develop telemetry, logging, and tracing infrastructure for diagnosing failures and driving performance improvements
Implement orchestration primitives for managing devices, nodes, and racks
Profile and tune performance across PCIe, memory, networking, kernel, and runtime layers
Collaborate closely with hardware, firmware, kernel, and runtime teams to co-design system interfaces and behavior

You may be a good fit if you have

Strong proficiency in C/C++ or Rust for low-level systems programming
Deep understanding of Linux internals, kernel/user-space boundaries, and system-level debugging
Experience working close to hardware: drivers, DMA, interrupts, memory management, or device control paths
Strong debugging skills using logs, tracing, and low-level observability tools
Strong communication skills and comfort collaborating across hardware and software teams

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

Experience with data center orchestration technologies such as Kubernetes and Docker
Experience with kernel development, device drivers, or firmware-adjacent software
Familiarity with PCIe, NUMA, networking, or high-speed interconnects
Experience with tracing and profiling tools such as perf, eBPF, ftrace, or custom instrumentation
Experience taking complex systems from early bring-up through stable operation
Background in HPC, AI infrastructure, or large-scale compute systems
Experience designing system test harnesses and failure-injection frameworks
Familiarity with Kubernetes or cluster orchestration at the node or control-plane level

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

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 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 as needed.

Supercomputing Engineer