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Etched is building a new category of AI hardware: frontier inference clusters. As a Physical Design Methodology Engineer, you will architect our PD flow from first principles. You will own the infrastructure that allows our design team to iterate at unprecedented speeds, directly accelerating our time-to-market and enabling PPA gains that aren't possible with off-the-shelf CAD methodologies.
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 . 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.
Etched is building a new category of AI hardware: frontier inference clusters. As a Physical Design Methodology Engineer, you will architect our PD flow from first principles. You will own the infrastructure that allows our design team to iterate at unprecedented speeds, directly accelerating our time-to-market and enabling PPA gains that aren't possible with off-the-shelf CAD methodologies.
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5-10+ years of previous experience with PD or PD methodology/CAD
Experience building and owning automated RTL-to-GDSII flows used by multiple block owners
Experience creating block level and full chip level PG mesh from scratch, including interpretation of design rule documents and EM/IR analysis
Experience with DRC-clean floorplanning flows and automated checks
Experience with Cadence (Innovus, Genus) or Synopsys ( Fusion Compiler) automated RTL-to-GDSII flows
Experience with PPA tuning and timing correlation across pre-route, post-route, and signoff environments
Experience integrating sign-off tools (PrimeTime, Tempus, Voltus, Pegasus, Calibre) into production flows
Experience with back-end design on advanced process nodes (5nm and below)
Experience with UPF-based low power design methodology and multi-mode multi-corner setup
Strong Tcl and Python skills for flow development and automation
Deeply creative and able to think from first principles
Familiarity with modern ML and LLM model architectures
Familiarity with AI tools for programming/coding
Experience with compute farm and job scheduler optimization for EDA workloads
Startup experience or comfort working in fast-paced environments
Etched believes in the Bitter Lesson . We are the first inference-focused frontier AI system, betting early on transformer and transformer-like architectures and on increasing model sizes. Our addressable market is the entirety of inference, unlike many of our competitors.
We are a fully in-person team in San Jose (Santana Row), 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 and work across disciplines as needed.
Private semiconductor startup building AI inference chips, racks, and software for frontier-model customers.
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Senior
Onsite
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