RTL Design Engineer at Etched
Etched is hiring a RTL Design Engineer in Cupertino, CA, US. On-site.
About Etched
Etched designs and builds AI hardware, including chips, racks, and software, for running frontier AI models. Its first product, Sohu, is an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) hard-coded for transformer model architectures, offering higher throughput and lower latency than an NVIDIA B200 GPU. The company targets inference workloads such as many-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts models, long-context processing, and agentic workloads.
RTL Design Engineer job description
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.
RTL Design Engineer
As an RTL Engineer at Etched, you will be critical in ensuring that our AI chips operate correctly and efficiently. You will develop and implement design verification strategies for both our existing and upcoming ASIC designs.
In this role, you will work closely with state-of-the-art architectures for machine learning. You do not need to have experience working with these yet, but you will be willing and able to learn quickly. You will work in a fast-paced environment with a high degree of autonomy, and be responsible for a key part of Etched’s success.
Representative projects:
- Implement a block to efficiently compute floating point math operators
- Provide feedback to the uArch team to make sure blocks meet timing and area constraints
You may be a good fit if you:
- At least 5 years of work experience in RTL development.
- Experience with high-speed digital logic.
- Proficiency in standard RTL design and synthesis tools
- Familiarity with verification work and writing test benches
- Are able to learn quickly about transformers and other aspects of modern artificial intelligence
- Willing to start quickly
Strong candidates may also have experience with:
- Experience with PCIe, Ethernet, or HBM technologies
- Familiarity with transformer models and machine learning.
- Familiarity with numerical representations and functions
- Ability to program with Python or another scripting language
We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification.
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
