Etched
Applied Engineer, Hardware
San Jose
Stay score
odds of building a lasting career here
Sponsors, but it's cap-subject — you still face the weighted lottery (~61% per draw at Level IV). Good if you win; have a cap-exempt backup on your list.
Lottery odds assume a STEM candidate.
Personalize to your clock →H-1B wage level
the lottery is wage-weighted — each level is one more entry
The bottom of this range ($150,000) is below the Level I prevailing wage of $152,173. An H-1B cannot be filed below the prevailing wage, so an offer at the floor of this band could not be sponsored as posted.
Based on the DOL prevailing wage for this occupation and worksite, a base salary of $180,294 would place this position at wage Level II. That figure is within the posted range, and I'd like to target it. This role classifies under "Computer Hardware Engineers" for prevailing-wage purposes.
DOL prevailing wage, 2026-27 wage year · Computer Hardware Engineers (17-2061) · San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. Wage level is derived by USCIS from the offered wage, occupation and worksite; the occupation shown is inferred from the job title.
Employer immigration record
from this employer's Department of Labor filings
Files H-1B transfers
Sourced from Department of Labor LCA, PERM and prevailing-wage disclosure data. Employer matching is by name, so figures may be split across an employer's legal entities. Absence of a filing means none appears in our copy of the data, not that none exists.
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About the role
- Designing frontier AI hardware means solving electrical and mechanical problems together: schematics and board layouts, power delivery and signal integrity, packaging and cooling, manufacturing and assembly.
- Every decision changes the constraints on the next.
- Etched offers a uniquely tight research loop: chips, boards, racks, cooling systems, manufacturing, and dedicated in-office compute under one roof.
Responsibilities
- Build and own AI systems that turn engineering requirements into verified electrical and mechanical designs, carrying intent and constraints from initial concepts through manufacturing outputs.
- Build agents that operate CAD, EDA, and simulation tools to generate designs, run experiments, inspect results, diagnose problems, and iterate with our teams, to the limits of model autonomy.
- Develop workflows spanning component selection, schematic capture, PCB layout, mechanical CAD, assemblies, thermal analysis, and electrical and structural simulation.
- Build the tool integrations and representations agents need to reason about geometry, connectivity, materials, tolerances, and coupled electrical, mechanical, thermal, and manufacturing constraints.
- Design evals that measure engineering correctness, constraint satisfaction, simulation accuracy, manufacturability, and performance on real design tasks.
- Turn simulation outputs, design-rule checks, engineering reviews, and physical measurements into structured feedback models can learn from.
- Curate proprietary datasets and design memory from complete trajectories, expert demonstrations, failed approaches, and manufactured outcomes.
- Build reproducible experiment infrastructure so design revisions, tool actions, simulation settings, and results remain traceable and experiments can run at scale.
- Ship agent-generated designs with our electrical, mechanical, and manufacturing teams, and quantify improvements in design cycle time, hardware performance, and engineering effort.
- Continuously evaluate new model releases and deploy the best models and methods for each stage of the design loop.
Requirements
- A track record of solving hard problems across stacks and domains-you enjoy being dropped into unfamiliar territory and figuring it out.
- Fluency using AI to learn and ramp on new problems-agentic coding tools, deep research, and frontier models are how you work, not an add-on.
- Comfort moving between research exploration, agentic experimentation, engineering-tool debugging, and production execution.
Compensation
- Base Compensation Range
Benefits
- Medical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage
- $500 per month credit for waiving medical benefits
- Various wellness benefits covering fitness, mental health, and more
- Plus Significant Equity
Company info
- We are the first inference-focused frontier AI system, betting early on transformer and transformer-like architectures and on increasing model sizes.
- We are a fully in-person team in San Jose (Santana Row), and greatly value engineering skills.
This listing is sourced directly from Etched's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.