Head of Software Engineering (Taiwan)

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

We are seeking a highly skilled and motivated Head of Software Engineering (Taiwan) to join our team. In this role, you will guide a team building the software that enables efficient execution, orchestration, and optimization of large-scale AI workloads on custom hardware. You will shape software architecture and delivery for performance-critical systems, and collaborate closely with firmware, hardware, and infrastructure teams to ensure our software stack scales reliably from early development through production deployments.

Key responsibilities

• Software Team Leadership

  • Lead, manage, and grow a team of system and platform software engineers based in Taiwan.

  • Set clear technical expectations and execution standards, fostering strong engineering fundamentals, ownership, and accountability.

  • Coach and mentor engineers through regular feedback, technical guidance, and career development planning.

  • Build a collaborative, high-trust team culture aligned with Etched’s global engineering values.

• Software Delivery & Execution

  • Own planning, prioritization, and delivery of system software milestones in close alignment with hardware, firmware, and manufacturing schedules.

  • Drive the full software development lifecycle, including requirements definition, design, implementation, testing, validation, release, and maintenance.

  • Ensure delivery of high-quality, maintainable, and production-ready system software that meets performance, reliability, and scalability goals.

• Technical Direction & Architecture

  • Guide technical design and architecture across system and platform software components, including hardware-facing layers, low-level services, and APIs.

  • Partner with US-based system software leadership to align on architecture, standards, and long-term technical roadmap.

  • Balance performance, reliability, security, and developer velocity across evolving hardware platforms.

• Lead Production Interface and Global Collaboration Cross-Functional

  • Act as the primary software leadership interfaced with production facilities in Taiwan, supporting rapid iteration and issue resolution.

  • Coordinate tightly with US system software, firmware, and product teams to ensure alignment on priorities, interfaces, and execution.

  • Partner with manufacturing, test engineering, and external vendors as needed to support production readiness and system reliability.

• Operational Excellence

  • Establish and reinforce best practices for source control, CI/CD, testing, documentation, and release management.
    Ensure system software is robust, debuggable, and suitable for deployment in manufacturing and data-center environments.

  • Manage priorities, resources, and risks across multiple parallel development and validation efforts.

You may be a good fit if you have (Must-have qualifications)

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 2+ years in a technical leadership or people management role.

• Strong experience in C/C++ and systems-level software development.

• Exposure to Python3 development.

• Proven track record of delivering complex software systems in close collaboration with hardware or firmware teams.

• Experience owning software through hardware bring-up, validation, and production cycles.

• Solid understanding of system-level architecture, hardware/software interfaces, and low-level debugging.

• Strong communication and leadership skills, with the ability to coordinate effectively across geographically distributed teams.

• Ability to operate effectively in a Taiwan-based role while working closely with US-based engineering counterparts across time zones.

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

• Experience developing system software for accelerators, high-performance computing, or data-center platforms.

• Familiarity with Linux kernel development, device drivers, or other hardware-adjacent software layers.

• Experience with performance optimization, low-level debugging, and profiling of system software.

• Exposure to manufacturing or factory test environments and supporting software bring-up in production settings.

• Experience working with global engineering teams and external manufacturing or hardware partners.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation packages, including generous equity packages

• Comprehensive insurance coverage and other top-of-market benefits

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 and Taipei, 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.