Systems Validation Engineer, L10

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

You will be the L10 System Validation Engineer, defining what it means for the accelerator platform to be production-ready, build the infrastructure to prove it, and personally drive the most critical issues from detection through root cause to verified fix.

Key Responsibilities

• Author and own the L10 system debug guide, serving as the definitive reference for factory failure analysis and debug teams.
• Own end-to-end escalation, debug, and resolution of L10 hardware failures across internal and field teams
• Develop and own L10 system debug guide to be used for the factory by the failure analysis / debug team.
• Own bring-up and integration across accelerator cards, interconnects (Retimers, C2C fabric), power (PSU, power integrity), and thermal domains.
• Lead system-level debug with no guaranteed starting point: hardware, firmware (BMC, BIOS, CPLD), and software all in scope simultaneously.
• Partner directly with CMs to validate incomplete systems, close coverage gaps, and gate production ramp.
• Build ad-hoc instrumentation, automation scripts, and debug workflows to extract signals from unstable, pre-spec systems.
• Run sustained workloads using real model variants under thermal and power stress
• Drive issue closure across cross-functional engineering teams: HW, FW, SW, thermal, power, and manufacturing.
• Represent validation readiness to leadership with crisp, data-backed assessments

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

• 10+ years in system validation, platform bring-up, or a tightly adjacent discipline - with direct, solo ownership of full L10 (tray/rack) integration on multi-component platforms.
• Demonstrated hands-on signal integrity and power integrity debug: SerDes, PCIe Gen5/6, Ethernet, HBM signaling
• Proven ability to build a coverage model that produces quantitative platform readiness metrics
• Strong Linux and Python/Bash scripting - you should be comfortable writing tools to instrument, automate, and extract data from systems that aren't fully debuggable yet.
• Occasional travel overseas to contract manufactures
• Experience validating AI accelerator or high-performance compute platforms with accelerators, NVMe, high-speed interconnects, and complex power delivery.
• Track record of detecting integration issues before they escape to production - in environments where specs, tooling, and infrastructure were still being built.

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

• Familiarity with BMC/IPMI, UEFI/BIOS bring-up, and CPLD firmware debug.
• Experience with HBM or CSRAM memory subsystem validation.
• Background validating multi-rack or tray-level systems at hyperscaler or AI hardware company scale.
• Exposure to Llama-class inference workloads as stress and coverage tools.
• Prior work with ODM/CM partners (Pegatron, Foxconn, Wistron, or equivalent) in a validation or NPI capacity.

What success looks like

• Critical escapes to production are zero - not because nothing broke, but because you assumed everything would break and proved otherwise.
• You created a structure where there was none: coverage models, automation, debug workflows, and RCA templates exist because you built them.
• Platform stress runs are stable, repeatable, and instrument-verified under sustained thermal and power load.
• Manufacturing partners have clear, data-driven pass/fail gates - and they trust the gates because you defined them.
• Engineering leadership has a real-time, quantified view of platform readiness at every stage of ramp.

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 and dinner in our office
• Unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification

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.