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're looking for a Head of People to help us build the highest-performing team in AI hardware. You’ll be responsible for shaping a culture of intensity, excellence, and ownership – where feedback is constant, growth happens fast, and unnecessary process never slows us down or gets in the way of great work. As we scale from a world-class founding team to a market-shaping company, you’ll architect the practices, infrastructure, and culture that help our people do their best work while preserving our startup ethos.

You’ll approach this role as both a strategic leader and a hands-on builder – partnering closely with the founders to design an organization that stays flat, nimble, and free of bureaucracy. You’re excited to strip away anything that slows us down and to help create an environment where exceptional people thrive.

Key responsibilities

• Drive a high-performance culture: Create and reinforce systems that emphasize excellence, velocity, and accountability across every function – without resorting to bureaucracy.

• Establish clear expectations and rapid feedback: Equip teams to share direct, actionable input continuously – not just at set intervals. Build lightweight approaches that help people understand where they stand and how to grow.

• Own people operations: Lead our people ops stack – payroll, benefits, equity systems, immigration processes, HRIS management, compliance, and documentation.

• Be a trusted advisor to leadership: Partner closely with the founders and executive team on org design, leadership development, and high-stakes people decisions.

• Champion culture and communication: Bring our values to life through onboarding, storytelling, internal communication, and team events.

• Manage risk and compliance thoughtfully: Ensure we operate within legal requirements while maintaining speed and clarity.

Representative projects

• Develop an approach to ongoing feedback that recognizes top performers, flags issues early, and reinforces our high standards – without relying on rigid review cycles.

• Redesign onboarding so new team members absorb our culture quickly and become productive faster.

• Launch practical resources that help team leads deliver feedback with clarity and respect.

• Implement scalable systems for tracking equity and total compensation in step with our growth and fundraising.

You may be a good fit if you have

• A track record of building legendary teams and cultures from zero to one – ideally you’ve helped an organization grow from fewer than 100 people to several hundred.

• Deep familiarity with all aspects of people operations (compensation, equity, HR systems, immigration, compliance), and strong understanding of how People functions at startups differ from those at big tech companies.

• An analytical mindset and commitment to using data to inform decisions.

• Exceptional judgment and communication – you know when to be direct, and when nuance matters.

• A bias toward action and comfort shifting between strategy and hands-on execution.

Strong candidates may also have experience with

• Fast-paced, deeply technical teams (e.g. AI, semiconductors, defense tech, hardware)

• Designing total rewards and compensation programs

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.