Test Infrastructure Engineer

About Etched
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.
Job Summary
Etched is seeking a Test Infrastructure Engineer to build and run the infrastructure behind factory testing of our AI systems, from new product introduction through mass production.
You will join a new, small central team that owns making factory testing reliable, repeatable, and scalable. A factory test floor looks a lot like a small datacenter: hundreds of boards, servers, and racks under test at once, all running our test software and reporting results back. You will own that layer: the systems that provision and run test stations, move test results and logs into one reliable source of truth, and roll out new test software safely across factories. You will work closely with hardware, firmware, software, and production teams, and with our contract manufacturing partners.
Key Responsibilities
- Build and operate the test execution platform that runs factory tests across stations, servers, and racks, and keep it running reliably during factory hours.
- Provision and manage the Linux fleet on the factory floor: OS imaging and network boot, configuration management, and lifecycle automation for test stations and systems under test.
- Design and maintain the networking that test stations and racks depend on, working with factory partners on site.
- Build data pipelines that reliably capture every test run, its logs, and hardware genealogy into a central view of test history, yield, throughput, and unit history.
- Own versioned release, canary, and rollback of factory test packages so new test software reaches production safely and traceably.
- Build monitoring and alerting across factory infrastructure, and lead debugging when infrastructure issues block production.
- Integrate with contract manufacturers' factory systems (MES/SFIS) and with shared internal data platforms.
- Automate repetitive debug work, such as gathering evidence and grouping repeated failure signatures, and help build toward AI-assisted failure triage.
You may be a good fit if you have (Must-have qualifications)
- 3+ years of experience building and operating production infrastructure.
- Strong Linux administration skills: boot process, package management, systemd, storage, and debugging from the command line.
- Solid networking fundamentals: TCP/IP, DNS, DHCP, VLANs, VPNs, and how networks are laid out in server rooms or datacenters.
- Experience with distributed systems: services that run across many machines and keep working when some of them fail.
- Strong coding skills in Python, C++, or Rust. You build real tools and services, not only configuration.
- Experience with automation and configuration management (e.g. Ansible, Terraform) and CI/CD.
- Experience with monitoring and observability tools (e.g. Prometheus, Grafana) and debugging production issues.
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
- Willingness to work onsite in San Jose or Taiwan and travel to manufacturing partners as needed.
Strong candidates may also have experience with (Nice-to-have qualifications)
- Bare-metal server fleets, lab or datacenter automation, or HPC clusters (e.g. PXE, Slurm).
- Server management interfaces such as BMC, IPMI, or Redfish.
- Manufacturing test infrastructure, test automation platforms, or factory software (MES, SFIS).
- Data pipelines for test results, yield analysis, or hardware genealogy.
- AI servers, GPU or accelerator systems, or other high-performance compute platforms.
- Working with contract manufacturers; Mandarin is a plus for Taiwan-based candidates.
- Bringing first-generation hardware into production at a fast-paced startup.
Benefits
- Competitive compensation packages including generous equity packages
- Comprehensive insurance coverage and other top-of-market benefits
How we’re different
Etched believes in the Bitter Lesson http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html. We are the first inference-focused frontier AI system. Our addressable market is the entirety of inference, unlike many of our competitors.
We are a fully in-person team in San Jose and Taipei, 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.

Employment type
FullTime

Work arrangement
No