Post-Silicon Validation Engineer

About the Company

Etched is building hardware for frontier intelligence. We co-design chips, racks, software, and manufacturing to deliver best-in-class throughput and latency across both prefill and decode workloads. Our first products are heavily focused on inference.

Responsibilities

• Drive early bring-up of first silicon, including boot, initialization, and debug of ASICs
• Perform deep-dive debug of silicon issues across RTL, firmware, and system levels
• Collaborate with design, verification, and board teams to root-cause functional and electrical issues
• Validate and characterize custom IP blocks and accelerator components
• Execute functional and performance validation of compute units and specialized processing elements
• Conduct IP-level and full-chip stress testing and corner case analysis
• Develop and extend post-silicon validation infrastructure, automation, and test suites
• Utilize lab instrumentation such as oscilloscopes, analyzers, BERTs, and pattern generators
• Define validation strategies and coverage metrics across design blocks and subsystems
• Partner with RTL, DFT, ATE, firmware, and system architecture teams
• Provide feedback on test escapes, yield issues, and silicon errata

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience in post-silicon validation, bring-up, and debug of ASICs
• Proven expertise in early silicon bring-up, debug, and validation
• Deep knowledge of peripheral interfaces and board-level debug
• Proficiency in C, Python, and scripting for validation automation
• Hands-on expertise with oscilloscopes, logic/protocol analyzers, and other validation lab tools
• Familiarity with firmware, bootloaders, and low-level silicon debug environments
• Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's degree in a related field
• Experience with low-speed peripheral interfaces (I2C, SPI, UART, JTAG)
• Experience with high-speed protocols (PCIe, Ethernet)
• Experience with memory subsystems (HBM, DDR)
• Experience with performance and thermal characterization
• AI/ML model profiling and workload correlation
• System-level validation of accelerators or server platforms

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
• Various wellness benefits covering fitness and mental health
• Daily lunch and dinner in the office
• Unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification