Core 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 chain-of-thought reasoning.

Position Overview:

The Core Operations team is our SEAL Team 6, tackling the most critical challenges across the organization and working directly with the COO.

This role requires strong business acumen, analytical skills, effective people management, and full ownership of high-priority initiatives. While your focus will shift over time, you will be working on the most important problems of today. It will be fast-paced, entrepreneurial, and offer significant opportunities to take on greater responsibilities while helping shape our company’s growth and direction.

Success in this role depends on personal accountability, ambition, and a results-driven mindset. This role requires availability outside of normal working hours, and the ideal candidate is excited about that requirement.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead Mission-Critical Initiatives: Design, prioritize, and drive the execution of high-priority, high-scope projects, ensuring measurable outcomes that align with the company’s objectives.
• Facilitate Leadership Decision-Making: Provide strategic insights and actionable recommendations to the leadership team through rigorous data analysis, identifying process gaps, optimizing workflows, and driving performance improvements across the business.
• Own Stakeholder Communication: Develop and deliver high-impact materials for internal and external stakeholders, ensuring clarity, alignment, and transparency across all levels. Foster a shared internal understanding of the company’s goals and objectives.
• Drive Cross-Functional Collaboration: Act as a key liaison between the executive team and departments across the organization, aligning teams on strategic initiatives, tracking progress, and ensuring timely, high-quality execution of key projects. Identify opportunities to elevate team capabilities and implement tools that increase productivity and scalability across the organization.
• Establish Operational Metrics: Work with leadership to set and track key performance indicators (KPIs), monitoring organizational performance and diagnosing opportunities for optimization to drive operational excellence and business impact.

Qualifications:

• Experience: Several years of experience in high-ownership, high-pressure roles within finance, consulting, or startup environments.
• Steering Expertise: Proven ability to manage multiple concurrent high-impact projects from inception to completion. Skilled in driving cross-functional alignment, ensuring accountability, and delivering results.
• Leadership & Communication: Ability to represent leadership, confidently make critical decisions on their behalf, and communicate information at the level of leadership.
• Adaptability & Time Management: Comfortable with ambiguity and working within a rapidly changing environment with ever shifting priorities.
• Strategic & Data-Driven: Expertise in designing and developing reports to elucidate metrics that measure success and drive decisions.
• Presentation & Analytical Skills: Ability to quickly synthesize information, create compelling presentations, and parse complex data with custom spreadsheets.

Bonus Qualifications:

• Technical Background: Proven experience or formal education in computer science, electrical engineering, artificial Intelligence, or a related field.
• Industry Expertise: Deep knowledge of the AI ecosystem, including emerging trends, cutting-edge technologies, and industry innovations.
• Startup Acumen: Strong understanding of startup stock, cap table, finance, and legal mechanics.

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 Cupertino, 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.

Benefits:

• Full medical, dental, and vision packages, with 100% of premium covered, 90% for dependents
• 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 Cupertino