Manufacturing Engineer, Etched
Electrical Engineering
$150-210k
+ Equity
More information about location
5 days a week in office (San Jose, CA)
Designing specialised chips for language model inference
Be an early applicant
Designing specialised chips for language model inference
21-100 employees
Be an early applicant
$150-210k
+ Equity
More information about location
5 days a week in office (San Jose, CA)
21-100 employees
Company mission
To create the world’s most powerful servers for transformer inference.
Role
Who you are
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering or a related field
- 5+ years of experience in manufacturing, product, or electrical engineering
- Strong knowledge of system hardware architectures and PCB fabrication/assembly
- Processes
- Experience with DFX/DFM, yield assessment, and board-level debug
- Hands-on experience with PCB CAD/CAE tools (e.g., Allegro, Valor) and understanding
- Of design-to-build flows
- Proven ability to work across NPI and sustaining environments, from proto bring-up to
- Ramp
- Strong problem-solving skills with focus on yield, manufacturability, and cost
- Optimization
- Collaborative mindset to work effectively with cross-functional teams and suppliers
What the job involves
- As a NPI Production Engineer at Etched, you will own the electrical manufacturing side of our AI systems, ensuring seamless product introduction from NPI through high-volume ramp
- You will collaborate with hardware, ASIC, mechanical, and reliability engineering to drive manufacturability, yield, and cost efficiency at scale
- This role focuses on board-level bring-up, design-for-manufacturing (DFM), BOM risk management, and sustaining improvements to ensure our AI hardware meets the highest standards of quality and reliability
- Lead electrical manufacturing readiness for new product introductions (NPI) and
- Sustaining engineering activities at board and system level
- Drive DFM (Design for Manufacturability) and DFT (Design for Test) for PCBAs and
- Electrical subsystems to ensure robust, scalable, and cost-effective production
- Develop and validate manufacturing structural inspection strategies (AOI, 5DX/3D,
- Boundary scale)
- Work with EMS partners to define and refine PCBA SMT processes to be high yielding
- And reliable
- Collaborate with suppliers to ensure process capability and yield targets are met
- Identify and resolve yield issues during ramp and mass production
- Perform failure analysis and root cause investigations for electrical issues
- Analyze production data to improve quality, cost, and cycle time
- Travel domestically and internationally to support manufacturing builds
- Partner with Supply Chain and Hardware teams to influence component selection and
- Mitigate manufacturing risk early in the design cycle
- Own BOM structuring and risk management, ensuring supply resilience and cost control
- Perform board bring-up and debug, applying DOE/EFA and hands-on lab work
- Review and influence Process FMEA and Design FMEA, providing diagnostics input
- Develop, release, and maintain product documentation across the lifecycle
- Provide leadership in complex issue resolution and drive defect/yield improvement
Our take
With AI developing rapidly, the chips that power them are doing so too. The computing requirements of technologies such as Chat GPT will increasingly require customised, hard-wired chips called ASICS, designed specially for the execution of AI models. Whilst GPUs are currently used for AI computing, Etched is making a bet on AI-hardwired chips becoming the predominant powering force of AI.
It’s a gamble, the founders themselves know that if transformers become obsolete, so will their AI-powering product. The SOHU chip that Etched builds differs from GPUs in that it has the AI architecture etched into the chip itself. General Processing Units are “general” and costly, so Etched is betting on specialised transformers taking their place in the near future.
Investors are drawn to Etched’s boldness. The 2022-founded company achieved $120 million in Series A funding just two years into its life, and received a further $500 million at the start of 2026. Etched plans to use this to amp up its competition with GPU company Nvidia, and claims to be 20 times faster than the latter’s AI-powered general processor - and significantly less costly too. Time will tell if Etched’s exciting and potentially revolutionary bet on tailored AI chips and transformers pays off.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (last 2 of 3 rounds)
Jan 2026
$500m
LATE VC
Jun 2024
$120m
SERIES A
Total funding: $625.4m
Company benefits
- Competitive Salary and Equity - We offer a competitive salary and equity package that aligns with industry standards
- Benefits - Your wellbeing is important to us. We offer unlimited PTO, life insurance, and a 401(k)
- Full Insurance Coverage - Our insurance includes full medical, dental, and vision with 100% of premium covered
Company HQ
Horace Mann and SJSU, San Jose, CA
Leadership
Robert Wachen
(Co-Founder & President)Also the Co-Founder of Prod and Mentor Labs, Birthday Cakes 4 Free Maryland and Generate Sales Online.
Gavin Uberti
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously Software Engineer at OctoML, Algorithms and BAckend Engineer at Coursedog and was a Software Engineer Intern at Xnor.ai.
Chris Zhu
(Co-Founder)Was a Teaching Fellow at Harvard and a Software Engineering Intern at Amazon and AvantStay. Was an Analyst at Harvard Undergraduate Capital Partners.
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