Head of Customer Engineering

Job Summary
Etched is seeking a Head of Customer Engineering to lead the organization responsible for ensuring our customers achieve seamless deployment, stable operations, and rapid success with Etched systems. This role bridges our technical engineering functions with the customer-facing organization, serving as the central coordination point across field engineering, fulfillment, and software integration teams.

This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who thrives in dynamic environments, can manage complex rack-scale deployments, and is equally comfortable triaging field issues as they are coordinating with product and software engineering. The ideal candidate has directly managed Field Application Engineers (FAEs) or Customer Engineers and can scale a function that owns customer success from install to production performance.

Key Responsibilities

Leadership & Team Development

• Build and manage a high-performing Customer Engineering organization covering both hardware and system software support, including FAEs, on-site deployment engineers, and software-focused application engineers.

• Hire and mentor engineers who are hands-on and capable of operating across data center environments, networking, and performance validation.

• Define how customer engineering interacts with Customer Program Management (CPM) and Go-To-Market (GTM) teams to ensure accountability and clarity on ownership.

• Champion documentation ownership across the team—ensuring processes, deployment guides, triage playbooks, and postmortems are consistently maintained, reviewed, and version-controlled for accuracy and scalability.

Customer Experience & Ownership

• Serve as the central engineering point of contact once systems are live on-site, responsible for ongoing technical health, debug, and escalation.

• Establish clear processes for critical issue triage, from initial FAE assessment through dispatch to the appropriate subject-matter experts.

• Partner closely with CPMs—who own end-to-end customer relationships—to ensure that technical progress matches commercial and delivery milestones.

• Bridge gaps between data center teams (hardware, networking, deployment) and serving/application teams (model serving performance, system software).

• Ensure that all customer-facing documentation and technical materials reflect the latest product and field learnings, improving customer self-sufficiency and deployment speed.

Software & System Integration

• Drive coverage and capability in system software and network integration, ensuring the team can handle not just rack installation but also issues affecting model performance or serving throughput.

• Collaborate with software engineering to create playbooks, runbooks, and automation that shorten debug cycles and build institutional knowledge from field learnings.

• Oversee the creation and maintenance of both internal and customer-facing tools, diagnostics, and documentation used for post-deployment validation, monitoring, and performance optimization.
  

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner with Product, Hardware, Software, and Operations to ensure customer insights directly shape roadmap priorities.

• Participate in launch readiness reviews to validate that new products are operationally and support ready.

• Work with GTM, CPM, and Field Services functions to connect field learnings back into planning, fulfillment processes, and documentation repositories.

• Drive consistency and completeness in cross-team technical documentation—ensuring reproducibility and knowledge sharing between field, product, and software teams.

Field Readiness & Escalation

• Lead the escalation response process for high-severity field issues, coordinating between Etched engineering and customer teams.

• Define scalable regional coverage models and field deployment plans as Etched grows.

• Establish documentation standards and review processes that ensure every field deployment, debug workflow, and system configuration is fully captured and accessible for future reference.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field.

• 10+ years in customer or field engineering, systems integration, or applications engineering - ideally with experience deploying complex compute systems in data centers or AI infrastructure.

• Proven experience managing FAEs or equivalent teams; hands-on familiarity with data center quality, triage, and debug processes.

• Demonstrated excellence in documentation ownership—establishing standards, maintaining clarity, and ensuring reproducibility across engineering and customer-facing materials.

• Understanding of rack-scale deployments, networking, telemetry, and system software integration.

• Strong operational discipline: can establish structure in ambiguous environments and coordinate across multiple internal and customer teams.

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills with technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Willingness to travel (~30%) to customer sites and deployment locations.

Compensation Range

• $200,000 - $275,000

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.