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
As a Forward Deployed Systems Engineer (Datacenter), you will work hands-on in large-scale datacenter environments to bring up, validate, and debug Etched accelerator-based systems. You’ll own customer deployment execution end-to-end, solve complex hardware/software/networking issues under real-world constraints, and build the tooling and processes that make deployments scalable and repeatable.
Key Responsibilities
Technical problem solving & diagnostics
- Drive deployments with customers and internal teams to identify risks and establish success criteria
- Debug and resolve system-level issues across hardware, firmware, drivers, Linux OS, and networking stacks
- Perform root-cause analysis on field issues and partner with internal engineering teams to reproduce issues and ship fixes
- Build and maintain diagnostics, monitoring/telemetry, and dashboards to improve visibility into system health
Firmware & system updates
- Coordinate firmware updates, hotfixes, and configuration changes to improve reliability and unblock customer deployments
- Manage update rollouts with minimal downtime and clear communication to customers and internal teams
Documentation & knowledge management
- Create and maintain deployment runbooks, escalation playbooks, known-issues documentation, and field service guides
- Capture structured learnings from deployments and convert them into repeatable processes
Cross-functional collaboration
- Partner with firmware/software/hardware engineering teams to drive reliability improvements
- Collaborate with Deployment, RMA, Sustaining Engineering, and Support teams to ensure smooth handoffs and long-term supportability
Process improvement & scaling
- Improve deployment workflows, metrics, and best practices to reduce deployment risk, time, and cost
- Identify patterns across deployments and drive process/tooling improvements that scale across customers
You may be a good fit if you have
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience)
- Experience supporting datacenter customers in systems, networking, AI infrastructure, or field engineering roles
- Deep experience with Linux/Unix installation, configuration, debugging, and performance tuning
- Strong networking fundamentals including TCP/IP, RDMA, and low-latency Ethernet
Hands-on experience with high-speed networking such as 100GbE / 400GbE
- Strong ability to diagnose performance and integration issues across hardware + OS + networking layers
BMC experience, telemetry/monitoring systems, RMA/failure analysis exposure
- Travel up to 30% to customer sites for deployments, on-site debugging, and launch support
Benefits
- Medical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage
- $500 per month credit for waiving medical benefits
- Housing subsidy of $2,500 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 http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html. 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…