Quality Engineer

Department: Platform

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

We are seeking a highly motivated Quality and Failure Analysis Engineer to join our team. In this role, you will bridge the gap between hardware design, production, and customer engagement to drive product learning, design and process improvements for quality and reliability, and work with the customer facing field teams to ensure and improve customer satisfaction. As a start-up initiating production, the person in this role will be driving the failure analysis and response for issues and learnings from customer RMAs, manufacturing pilots, and reliability testing. This includes thorough root cause analysis, customer RCA and corrective action reporting, and driving results into design and manufacturing process improvements with the US and Taiwan teams. You will collaborate closely with cross-functional teams, including platform design, test, software engineering, manufacturing, and go-to-market and field support.

Responsibilities

• Drive failure analysis: Physical and electrical FA, manufacturing process analysis, and other root-cause investigations for identifying sources of failures and defects in customer returns, manufacturing pilot build excursions, and reliability test or qualification failures

• Implement corrective/preventive actions (8D, CAPA).

• Direct Customer Quality Support: For quality and reliability issues and escalations including customer RMA to failure analysis, root cause, and corrective and preventive actions and customer reports of the same. As shipments ramp, help build the team and develop the internal analytical tools and capabilities, and external lab relationships, to carry out this work.

• ODM/CM Collaboration: Partner with production engineers and the quality and reliability engineering team to help architect and design process improvements and end-to-end quality monitors to ensure consistent and efficient processes

• Champion continuous improvement projects across yield, throughput, and defect reduction.

You may be a good fit if you have

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Electrical or electronics engineering, Manufacturing Engineering, or a related field.

• 5+ years of hands-on complex system and/or PCBA failure analysis related experience in quality engineering, computer engineering, or manufacturing engineering roles, including publishing customer-facing root causes analyses and corrective action reports

• Experience with high-performance systems with high-speed interconnect

• Proven track record working with Tier 1 US-based contract manufacturers and/or ODMs, and third party or external FA labs

• Familiarity with server assembly, burn-in, and system-level test workflows.

• Strong knowledge of quality tools and methodologies (SPC, FMEA, control plans, DOE).

• Strong understanding of system-level and functional testing methodologies.

• Excellent cross-functional communication skills; ability to drive alignment across engineering, ops, customer facing teams, and suppliers.

• Comfortable working on-site at CM factories and resolving issues in real time.

Strong candidates may also have experience with (Nice-to-have qualifications)

• Background in high-performance compute hardware.

• Experience with L6 (PCBA) - L11 (rack-level) integration, testing, debug, and validation.

• ASQ or other certifications in Quality Engineering, Failure Analysis, and/or Process Improvement

• Exposure to thermal/power stress testing and system engineering.

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.