Mechanical Operations Lab Lead

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 looking for a Mechanical Lab Operations Lead to own the day-to-day operational backbone of our R&D and prototyping facility. This is a highly cross-functional, hands-on role responsible for everything required to keep a hybrid clean/dirty mechanical lab running seamlessly. You will manage a diverse footprint that spans a traditional machine shop, an advanced additive manufacturing and post- eprocessing facility, a high-precision inspection area, and a large-scale inventory/rack build space.

Reporting to the Head of Lab Operations, you will be the ultimate custodian of lab safety, machine uptime, asset tracking, and space workflow. You will partner directly with mechanical, thermal, and hardware validation engineers across multiple product lines to triage fabrication requests, manage material pipelines, enforce EH&S compliance, and maintain an environment where engineering can move at lightning speed without sacrificing organization or safety.

• →

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.