Forward Deployed Systems Engineer
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
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 / 400GbEStrong ability to diagnose performance and integration issues across hardware + OS + networking layers
BMC experience, telemetry/monitoring systems, RMA/failure analysis exposureTravel 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 $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.