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

As the Head of Customer Engineering, you will lead the team responsible for ensuring successful customer onboarding, deployment, and long-term technical satisfaction. You will manage and scale a growing team of Application Engineers and various customer supporting roles. Serve as the executive technical point-of-contact for customer engagements—ensuring the organization delivers the people, tools, documentation, and escalation paths needed to support demanding AI infrastructure rollouts.

This is a hands-on leadership role that requires both strategic thinking and operational execution. You will own the customer technical experience while deeply partnering with cross-functional teams (hardware, software, systems, and product) to influence roadmap decisions and accelerate time-to-value for our customers.

Key responsibilities

• Leadership & Team Management

  • Build, lead, and mentor a high-performing Customer Engineering and Applications team, including regional field engineers and on-site deployment specialists.

  • Define and drive the team’s charter, structure, and processes to support pre-sales evaluations, deployment programs, escalations, and post-sales technical success.

  • Establish a strong culture of ownership, responsiveness, and continuous improvement.

• Customer Experience Ownership

  • Serve as a technical executive sponsor for key customer relationships, ensuring smooth onboarding, rapid integration, and scalable system support.

  • Champion the customer experience internally by aligning technical resources to support critical customer milestones and issue resolution.

  • Proactively identify and close gaps in customer enablement, support coverage, and system readiness.

• Program Development & Infrastructure

  • Oversee the creation and maintenance of all customer-facing documentation (e.g., system integration guides, rack power/network/thermal requirements, burn-in and diagnostics tools, software/firmware/CRU upgrade instructions).

  • Define RMA and field support workflows, including critical debug and escalation paths.

  • Develop scalable programs for training, diagnostics, and support tools to improve serviceability.

• Cross-Functional Collaboration

  • Act as a key partner to engineering, product, operations, and manufacturing teams to ensure customer insights drive roadmap priorities and support readiness.

  • Participate in cross-functional reviews to ensure new products are launch-ready with proper enablement and support.

  • Influence tools and infrastructure needed to scale deployments, including automation, telemetry, and remote monitoring.

• Field Readiness & Escalation

  • Oversee technical support for rack-scale deployments, including on-site support, lab validation, and issue triage.

  • Establish regional coverage strategies and travel policies for support team deployment.
    Manage high-priority escalations and represent the technical voice of the customer at all levels of the organization.

You may be a good fit if you have

• A Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field (MBA is a plus).

• 8–15+ years of experience in customer engineering, applications engineering, field support, or systems integration, with at least 3 years in a people management or technical leadership role.

• Proven success managing technical teams supporting complex hardware and software products in AI, semiconductor, or data center environments.

• Deep understanding of rack-scale system integration, power/network planning, diagnostics, and high-performance compute hardware.

• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to work effectively with engineers, executives, and customers.

• Willingness to travel (>30%) to customer sites across the U.S. and potentially internationally.

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)

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.