Platform Operations

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're hiring an Operations Lead to serve as a high-impact business partner embedded within one Platform Engineering Team. This person will be responsible for helping the department function like a high-performing startup within a startup, with clear goals, smooth execution, and strong internal alignment.

The role blends strategy, operational design, planning discipline, and execution. You'll work closely with our VP of Platform Engineering to ensure hiring, budgeting, performance tracking, and quarterly execution all run at the speed and precision required for first-of-its-kind hardware.

This is not a project manager, EA, or Chief of Staff role. You will be a critical part of how Etched’s most important technical bets are made and executed.

Key Responsibilities

• Own quarterly and annual planning rhythms for the Platform team, including objective-setting, milestone tracking, and cross-functional coordination

• Lead strategic projects that align departmental objectives to broader business needs

• Track and manage budgets, vendor relationships, and operational overhead while ensuring technical teams remain focused and unblocked

• Define and track cross-functional capability roadmaps: milestones, DRIs, success criteria

• Build the demand model -- where engineering time is going, gaps vs. headcount, whether hiring closes these gaps, what to rescope if there’s a delta

• Work closely with the Platform team to develop MBR, QBR, and Board readiness material

• Manage departmental hiring plans, recruiting execution, and offer processes in partnership with functional leaders and talent teams

• Collaborate with supply chain and platform teams to manage early engineering risk buys.

• Work with Finance and Platform teams to align demand forecasts for platform solutions.

• Partner with engineering leads on org design, performance systems, and headcount strategy to ensure teams are scaling effectively

You may be a good fit if you have

• 5-8 years of experience in business operations, engineering operations, or technical program roles in fast-paced environments

• Operations Strategy, Business Operations, or seasoned Chief of Staff background at Tier 1 startups or technical companies

• Experience designing and managing complex, high-stakes timelines with cross-functional dependencies

• High trust with senior engineers and executives, with the ability to influence without authority and drive decisions forward

• Strong aptitude for learning new software tools and building internal systems (strong spreadsheet and modeling skills are a plus)

• A bachelor’s degree in engineering or a related technical field, or equivalent technical fluency and credibility

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

• Driving recruiting results including sourcing strategy, comp design, and offer negotiation

• Running performance review processes and org design projects in engineering-heavy orgs

• Budget management and vendor contract oversight for R&D-focused departments

• Working closely with technical founders or executives in an early or growth-stage company

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 and 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 and Taipei, 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.