Forward Deployed Systems Engineer

Etched • San Jose, CA

8d • $150,000 - $240,000 • Onsite

About The Position

As a Forward Deployed Systems Engineer (Datacenter) at Etched, you will work hands-on in large-scale datacenter environments to bring up, validate, and debug Etched accelerator-based systems. You will own customer deployment execution end-to-end, address complex hardware, software, and networking issues under real-world constraints, and build tooling and processes that make deployments scalable and repeatable. The role includes travel of up to 30% to customer sites for deployments, on-site debugging, and launch support.

Etched builds hardware for frontier intelligence by co-designing chips, racks, software, and manufacturing. Its first products focus on inference. The company describes itself as a fully in-person team in San Jose (Santana Row), where technical staff are expected to contribute across engineering and research and work across disciplines as needed.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience supporting datacenter customers in systems, networking, AI infrastructure, or field engineering roles.
• Deep experience with Linux/Unix installation, configuration, debugging, and performance tuning.
• Strong networking fundamentals, including TCP/IP, RDMA, and low-latency Ethernet.
• Hands-on experience with high-speed networking such as 100GbE or 400GbE.
• Strong ability to diagnose performance and integration issues across hardware, operating system, and networking layers.
• Experience with BMC, telemetry or monitoring systems, and RMA or failure analysis.
• Ability to travel up to 30% to customer sites for deployments, on-site debugging, and launch support.

Responsibilities

• Drive deployments with customers and internal teams to identify risks and establish success criteria.
• Debug and resolve system-level issues across hardware, firmware, drivers, Linux OS, and networking stacks.
• Perform root-cause analysis on field issues and partner with internal engineering teams to reproduce issues and ship fixes.
• Build and maintain diagnostics, monitoring and telemetry, and dashboards to improve visibility into system health.
• Coordinate firmware updates, hotfixes, and configuration changes to improve reliability and unblock customer deployments.
• Manage update rollouts with minimal downtime and clear communication to customers and internal teams.
• Create and maintain deployment runbooks, escalation playbooks, known-issues documentation, and field service guides.
• Capture structured learnings from deployments and convert them into repeatable processes.
• Partner with firmware, software, and hardware engineering teams to drive reliability improvements.
• Collaborate with Deployment, RMA, Sustaining Engineering, and Support teams to ensure smooth handoffs and long-term supportability.
• Improve deployment workflows, metrics, and best practices to reduce deployment risk, time, and cost.
• Identify patterns across deployments and drive process and tooling improvements that scale across customers.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage.
• $500 per month credit for waiving medical benefits.
• Housing subsidy of $2,500 per month for those living within walking distance of the office.
• Relocation support for those moving to San Jose (Santana Row).
• Wellness benefits covering fitness, mental health, and more.
• Daily lunch and dinner in the office.
• Unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time