Job Description

About Etched

Etched is building Sohu, an AI inference chip that's >10x faster than NVIDIA GPUs . Sohu is hyper-specialized for running transformers: the architecture that powers all frontier AI models today (from OpenAI to xAI, Meta, Deepseek, etc.). That specialization allows us to deliver an order of magnitude improvement on throughput, latency, and cost per token at the same time, unlocking massive new use cases (such as real-time video and never-ending agents) and enabling all AI companies to deploy their products at humanity-scale.

Now 150+ people strong, Etched has attracted some of the top engineers, AI researchers, PhDs, quants, and industry legends , such as Brian Loiler (who built HGX/DGX, >80% of NVIDIAs revenue) and David Munday (who built Googles TPU v1-v5 software and firmware stack). Etched has also raised hundreds of millions from leading investors , including Peter Thiel, Jane Street, and Two Sigma, who are all betting that Etched will unlock the AI inference singularity.

Job Summary

Were looking for a key hire to support our co-founder and COO, Rob, as Chief fo Staff. Youll be Robs right hand, helping him move faster, stay focused, and operate at peak efficiency across deals, customers, fundraising, operations, finance, legal, people, and special projects. Youll have a close look at how one of the fastest-growing startups operates in the most important industry of our time.

From Robert:

Youll support me in doing whatever it takes to make Etched win: from handling customer and vendor communications to managing the dozens of parallel threads on my team and across the company. You should be ready to go all-in. I generally work 16 hours a day, 7 days a week and live next to the office. If this picture does not excite you, this role isnt a good fit.

My promise to you is that as Chief of Staff, you will learn more about startups, people, and AI infrastructure than any other place in the world. If youre energized by speed, intensity, and our mission, I cant imagine a better opportunity. This is a direct path to high ownership and visibility at Etched.

Representative Projects

• Managing my time

  1. Manage Robs calendar, inbox, and communication flow, ensuring hes focused on the highest-leverage priorities

  2. Coordinate high-stakes meetings, investor calls, and complex travel logistics

  3. Planning customer visits, team bonding events, offsites, and spontaneous trips

  4. Anticipate needs, ruthlessly prioritize, and ensure nothing falls through the cracks

• People & Culture

  1. Working directly with the talent team to support in hiring, onboarding, and training top talent

  2. Work cross-functionally to implement and drive policies across the entire organization

  3. Act as the connective tissue between Rob and the rest of the teamensuring information flows, follow-ups happen, and momentum doesnt stall

• Strategic Projects

  1. Prepare content and analysis for Board meetings, investor updates, customer calls

  2. Building the decks, data room, CRM, and material for future financings, whether venture, debt, or customer partnership financing

  3. Help build and manage key operational dashboards or OKR processes to track and drive progress against KPIs

  4. Collaborate on org design efforts,including team structure, leveling, and headcount planning

Required skills/traits

• Meticulously organized and detail-oriented -> nothing slips through the cracks

• High horsepower can handle many different projects, learn quickly, and execute

• Low ego happy to do work thats important and not glorious

• High agency finds paths through/around challenging problems, takes initiative

• Dependable can close my eyes and trust youll get it done; you do what you say youll do, by the time you say you will, without significant review

• Company-first you should assess everything you do through the lens of building Etched

• Impatient you should have a natural desire to see things done faster than most people think possible.

Nice to have skills/traits

• Prior experience supporting a founder, executive, or senior team in a high-growth startup or similarly fast-paced environment

• Future founder you plan to run your own startup one day

• Capital markets background familiarity with startup corporate finance and governance

• Technical background deep understanding of AI, hardware, and/or semiconductors

• Industry know-how deep understanding of where AI research, competition, etc. are going and the major influences in the space

Benefits

• Full medical, dental, and vision packages, with generous premium coverage

• Housing subsidy of $2000/month for those living within walking distance of the office

• Daily lunch and dinner in our office

• Relocation support for those moving to West San Jose

Compensation Range

• $150,000 - $250,000

How were 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 West San Jose, 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.

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