NPI Manufacturing Engineer

Department: Production

Location: San Jose

Compensation: $150K – $210K • Plus Significant Equity

Employment Type: FullTime

About Etched

Etched is building the world’s first AI inference system purpose-built for transformers - delivering over 10x higher performance and dramatically lower cost and 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. Backed by hundreds of millions from top-tier investors and staffed by leading engineers, Etched is redefining the infrastructure layer for the fastest growing industry in history.

Job Summary

As a NPI Production Engineer at Etched, you will own the electrical manufacturing side of our AI systems, ensuring seamless product introduction from NPI through high-volume ramp. You will collaborate with hardware, ASIC, mechanical, and reliability engineering to drive manufacturability, yield, and cost efficiency at scale. This role focuses on board-level bring-up, design-for-manufacturing (DFM), BOM risk management, and sustaining improvements to ensure our AI hardware meets the highest standards of quality and reliability.

Representative projects

• Lead electrical manufacturing readiness for new product introductions (NPI) and

  sustaining engineering activities at board and system level.

• Drive DFM (Design for Manufacturability) and DFT (Design for Test) for PCBAs and

  electrical subsystems to ensure robust, scalable, and cost-effective production.

• Develop and validate manufacturing structural inspection strategies (AOI, 5DX/3D,

  boundary scale).

• Work with EMS partners to define and refine PCBA SMT processes to be high yielding

  and reliable.

• Collaborate with suppliers to ensure process capability and yield targets are met.

• Identify and resolve yield issues during ramp and mass production.

• Perform failure analysis and root cause investigations for electrical issues.

• Analyze production data to improve quality, cost, and cycle time.

• Travel domestically and internationally to support manufacturing builds.

• Partner with Supply Chain and Hardware teams to influence component selection and

  mitigate manufacturing risk early in the design cycle.

• Own BOM structuring and risk management, ensuring supply resilience and cost control.

• Perform board bring-up and debug, applying DOE/EFA and hands-on lab work.

• Review and influence Process FMEA and Design FMEA, providing diagnostics input.

• Develop, release, and maintain product documentation across the lifecycle.

• Provide leadership in complex issue resolution and drive defect/yield improvement

initiatives.

You may be a good fit if you have

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering or a related field.

• 5+ years of experience in manufacturing, product, or electrical engineering

• Strong knowledge of system hardware architectures and PCB fabrication/assembly

  processes.

• Experience with DFX/DFM, yield assessment, and board-level debug.

• Hands-on experience with PCB CAD/CAE tools (e.g., Allegro, Valor) and understanding

  of design-to-build flows.

• Proven ability to work across NPI and sustaining environments, from proto bring-up to

  ramp.

• Strong problem-solving skills with focus on yield, manufacturability, and cost

  optimization.

• Collaborative mindset to work effectively with cross-functional teams and suppliers.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage

  • $500 per month credit for waiving medical benefits

• Housing subsidy of $2k per month for those living within walking distance of the office

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

• Various wellness benefits covering fitness, mental health, and more

• Daily lunch + dinner in our office

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.