Head of Customer Fulfillment & Operations

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

Etched is seeking a Head of Customer Fulfillment & Operations to own the operational backbone of our customer delivery and support experience. This leader will oversee customer order fulfillment, on time delivery, service and spares, global logistics, RMA flow, rework/refurbishment, and installation readiness - ensuring seamless fulfillment of customer commitments from factory to field.

As the essential customer-facing operations lead, you will build and manage the infrastructure that ensures our hardware is delivered, serviced, and supported at the highest standards of quality and reliability. You’ll partner closely with GTM, Customer Success, Manufacturing Ops, and Supply Chain to create a world-class fulfillment and service organization.

This role will lead a growing team including logistics, RMA & service depot management, installation management, and rework/refurbishment engineering.

Key responsibilities

• Demand Forecasting & Fulfillment Planning

  • Develop and maintain demand forecasts, integrating sales pipeline, customer install schedules, and service parts requirements.

  • Translate forecasts into fulfillment and spares strategies, aligning with manufacturing and supply chain teams.

  • Build fulfillment processes and infrastructure to scale with customer deployments (initially small, increasing as volume ramps).

• Customer Fulfillment & Logistics

  • Own end-to-end fulfillment of AI server shipments, including customer order commitment, fulfillment, on time delivery, logistics planning, spares management, and global distribution.

  • Develop forward-deployed spares and service logistics strategies to ensure SLA compliance.

• Service & RMA

  • Establish and manage RMA flows, service depots, and repair/refurbishment operations.

  • Drive turnaround efficiency and quality in rework and refurbishment.

• Installation & Field Readiness

  • Build processes for server installation at customer sites, coordinating with field engineers and customer success.

  • Ensure documentation, tools, and spares readiness for seamless customer deployments.

• Operational Leadership

  • Lead, mentor, and scale a team across logistics, RMA/service, installation, and rework/refurbishment functions.

  • Implement metrics and dashboards to track demand accuracy, fulfillment execution, and service responsiveness.

  • Partner with Sales and BizOps to align operational capacity with bookings and revenue targets.

You may be a good fit if you have

• 10+ years of experience in customer-facing hardware operations, fulfillment, or service roles,

• Proven track record building and managing logistics, service, or RMA organizations for servers, datacenter systems, or other complex hardware.

• Strong customer orientation and ability to communicate effectively with both technical and executive stakeholders.

• Deep knowledge of global logistics, depot repair operations, and installation processes.

• Leadership experience managing multi-functional operations teams.

• Bilingual proficiency in English and Mandarin strongly preferred.

Strong candidates may also have experience with

• Experience scaling fulfillment and service ops at a fast-growth startup or hyperscale hardware company.

• Familiarity with datacenter environments and customer deployment requirements.

• Background in continuous improvement programs, cost-of-service reduction, or serviceability engineering.

• Experience setting up global service depots and spares strategies.

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)

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.