By burning the transformer architecture into our chips, we’re creating the world’s most powerful servers for transformer inference.
By burning the transformer architecture into our chips, we’re creating the world’s most powerful servers for transformer inference.
What they do: Designs AI chips (Sohu) optimized for transformer-model inference
Stage / funding: Series A (announced Jun 25, 2024), reported ~$120M round; total funding reported $625.4M
Founded: Around 2022
Team size: Approximately 317 employees
AI inference performance and efficiency for transformer models
2022
Computer Hardware Manufacturing
$120,000,000
Round reported to include multiple institutional and angel participants
“Includes institutional VCs and prominent angel/backer participation (e.g., Two Sigma Ventures, Peter Thiel, Thomas Dohmke)”
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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 Building cutting-edge model-specific ASICs requires crafting custom infrastructure and toolchains to support ultra-fast, reliable, and scalable development across the stack - from simulation to silicon. We build this infrastructure as software - and we engineer it with the same best practices we apply to our products. We use the same rigor, design discipline, and quality standards and testing as we do to our ASIC, software, and platform.
You will lead the development and adoption of next-generation infrastructure tooling, enabling Etched ASIC, Software, and Platform engineers to iterate faster, build more reliably, and push the boundaries of AI performance. This includes building and scaling our hybrid high-performance compute (HPC) cluster, optimized for massively parallel CI, EDA workflows, Emulation, and hardware-aware job execution.
You’ll also architect and implement a state-of-the-art observability stack with LLM integration and a strong emphasis on streaming health and performance telemetry, log aggregation, distributed tracing, insight generation, synthetic testing, and smart alerting - across CI pipelines, simulation clusters, and service endpoints.
This role demands a strong software engineering mindset, quality instincts, and deep understanding of systems. It’s not just about writing scripts - it’s about writing code that builds and manages infrastructure with precision, repeatability, and intent.
Key Responsibilities
Representative projects
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Benefits
Base Compensation Range
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.