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 chain-of-thought reasoning.

Procurement

As a hardware and an AI company, we manage lots of vendor relationships. Time-to-market is the objective function of our business, and it’s essential to evaluate vendors and purchase products much faster than most semiconductor projects.

You will work closely with the operations team to create and implement a system to rapidly evaluate vendors, make purchases, and ensure on-time product delivery. This is an incredibly important job: every minute engineering is blocked on POs, NDAs, redlines, and decisions is a minute customers can’t use our hardware.

Representative projects:

• Issue purchase orders in ERP system and get materials on time for production
• Negotiating favorable payment plans and pricing for IPs and engineering tools
• Creating a system to automatically place and track purchase orders across the company
• Running the redline process for a scope-of-work contract with a hardware vendor
• Identifying and evaluating suppliers, gathering quotes, and making recommendations
• Evaluate existing contracts for issues and renegotiate them when necessary

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have at least 3 years of experience managing, organizing, purchasing, and maintaining large quantities of hardware and/or semiconductor equipment
• Have experience redlining and negotiating contracts quickly
• Have built systems and tools to sign, track, and follow-up on purchase orders
• Familiarity with typical pricing and expectations of vendors in the semiconductor industry

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification.

Strong candidates may also have experience with:

• Personal relationships with our largest vendors (Synopsys, Cadence, GCP)

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 Cupertino, 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.

Benefits:

• Full medical, dental, and vision packages, with 100% of premium covered, 90% for dependents
• 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 Cupertino