Site Reliability Engineer - Fleet Command & Control

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.

You'll be one of Etched's first Site Reliability Engineers, building the command-and-control layer for our fleet of frontier inference systems: the alerting, automated recovery and fleet data that keep clusters serving, and the routing that gets each problem to the right expert. Our Supercomputing and Infrastructure teams build the fleet management, rollout and telemetry backbone; but you'll decide which signals define a healthy system, set how we alert and respond, and build agentic hardware health workflows on top of it.

Your job is to design and run a scalable system. Fleet SREs own detection, first response and handoff; domain SREs embedded in each team own the deep product fixes. Over time, most problems should be caught by an alert that measures what users experience, which is then triaged by agents, and sent to an engineer as needed, with the logs, dashboards and recent changes already attached.

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• 2+ years in site reliability, production engineering or infrastructure for large-scale production systems (8+ years for the San Jose lead seat).

• You've defined alerting standards that several teams adopted, using Prometheus, Grafana or similar, and you know SLOs, error budgets and alert design well enough to teach them.

• Real on-call experience for services with external users, including leading incidents and writing blameless postmortems.

• A track record of debugging production incidents in systems you didn't write, under time pressure, from logs, metrics, traces and core dumps.

• Experience with application and scripting languages like python, golang, rust, etc.

• Hands-on with Linux, containers, Kubernetes and infrastructure as code (Terraform, Ansible or similar).

• Fluency with Linux debugging tools (perf, strace, gdb, dmesg, journalctl, lspci, tcpdump) for when the dashboards don't have the answer.

• Comfort with hardware in the loop: devices dropping off PCIe, ECC errors, power and thermal events, and failures that cross software and physical layers.

• Sound judgment about when automation should act on its own and when it should page a person.

• Clear writing, and the ability to get five or more teams to agree on shared standards.

• Operated GPU, accelerator or HPC fleets.

• LLM inference serving: prefill and decode, KV cache, batching, and latency metrics such as time to first token.

• Network debugging from switch to edge: tracing problems across switches, load balancers and Cloudflare, and using edge controls like rate limits to shed or shift traffic during an incident.

• Out-of-band management (BMC, Redfish, IPMI) and fleet-wide firmware rollouts.

• Data center telemetry: power distribution, liquid cooling and CDUs, DCIM.

• PagerDuty or similar incident tooling, including event correlation and automated remediation.

• Working with colocation providers and remote-hands technicians.

• Founding or scaling an SRE function at a startup.

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.