About Etched

Etched is building AI chips that are hard-coded for individual model architectures. Our first product (Sohu) only supports transformers, but has an order of magnitude more throughput and lower 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

Job Summary

We are seeking a highly motivated Senior Quality Engineer to join our team. In this role, you will bridge the gap between hardware design, software development, production, and customer engagement, ensuring infrastructure readiness to deliver our fully integrated racked solution, predictably with high quality. As a start-up initiating production, the person in this role will be designing and implementing a QMS; establishing customer quality support flows and directly providing customer support; defining field support diagnostic processes and response flows alongside R&D and production; driving the processes and execution for customer RMA, failure analysis, and root cause analysis; and guiding the development of elements of the QMS.

You will collaborate closely with cross-functional teams, including ASIC design and software engineering, test engineering, manufacturing, and go-to-market, to develop quality policies and procedures, build and optimize production quality processes and flows at Etched and at our contract manufacturers that drive customer satisfaction, reduce risk, improve throughput, and drive towards cost efficiency.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design and Deploy a QMS: Work across the organization to define quality policies and determine customer quality expectations for initial and future product deployments, define appropriate quality goals and metrics, and design and implement policies and procedures across the enterprise to ensure the capability to meet those goals.

• Enterprise Tools and Business Process Development/Improvement: Create and document quality management processes and tool specifications, linking the business processes supported by R&D tools, document management, ERP, defect tracking, and other systems to improve cross-functional DFx, and drive quality goals aligned with product requirements. Coordinate with R&D, manufacturing, and customer engagements.

• Direct Customer Quality Support: Work with management to develop customer support flows for quality and reliability issues and escalations including customer RMA to failure analysis, root cause, and corrective and preventive actions and customer reports of the same. As shipments ramp, help build a team and develop the internal analytical tools and capabilities to carry out this work.

• Leadership and Development: Partner in building and training a capable quality engineering team, and provide cross-functional training and leadership, to support ramping of volumes and customer qualification and quality response interactions. Mentor, guide, and develop engineers to ensure our overall capability and quality meet our customer’s expectations.

• ODM/CM Collaboration: Partner with production engineers and the reliability engineering team to help architect and design end-to-end quality monitors and reliability test plans, and ensure consistent and efficient flows of data and processes for assessment/response to the results..

• Continuous Improvement: Analyze design flows, ERP implementation, test, and quality data to identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies and implement improvements to boost overall company performance.

You maybe a good fit if you have:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Manufacturing Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field.

• 10+ years of experience in quality or reliability engineering, manufacturing process design and engineering, production engineering, or a related role in the technology or electronics industry.

• Strong understanding of system-level and functional testing methodologies.

• Quality management, lean manufacturing, statistical process control, and/or six sigma experience. ASQ Certification or similar for quality management and LSS (Lean Six Sigma) is a plus.

• Experience working with custom semiconductor and complex PCBA technologies, particularly PCBA assembly and SMT processes, as well as data center infrastructure.

• Experience with manufacture, assembly and integration of complex systems with high-speed interconnect

• Proficiency in data analysis tools and methods for optimizing production time, yield, and throughput.

• Excellent problem-solving skills with a focus on process optimization and continuous improvement.

• Strong communication and teamwork skills to collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams.

• Hands-on experience with server-level and rack level assembly, integration, and diagnostics.

• Familiarity with automation tools and techniques for production lines.

Benefits

• Full medical, dental, and vision packages, with generous premium coverage

• Housing subsidy of $2,000/month for those living within walking distance of the office

• Daily lunch and dinner in our office

• Relocation support for those moving to San Jose (Santana Row)

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.