Silicon Validation Engineer, Software

About this role

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

We are seeking a skilled and motivated Silicon Validation Firmware Engineer to develop the firmware and low-level software that validates our AI/ML accelerator ASICs across their entire Lifecycle, from pre-silicon emulation and FPGA prototyping through post-silicon bring-up, characterization, and production ramp. In this role you will build the validation firmware, test content, and automation that prove our silicon works, and you will be hands-on debugging real hardware in the lab. Your work directly enables functional correctness, performance, and reliability of our cutting-edge products.

Key Responsibilities

- Develop and own low-level validation firmware in C/C++ that runs across emulation and physical silicon, providing test content pre-silicon and reusing it to drive post-silicon bring-up.

- Drive early bring-up of first silicon: boot, initialization, feature enablement, and debug of ASICs.

- Perform deep-dive debug of silicon issues spanning firmware, RTL, electrical, protocol, and system levels; root-cause and resolve failures.

- Build firmware infrastructure including hardware abstraction layers (HALs) and low-level device drivers for compute units, memory subsystems, and high-speed interfaces.

- Develop and extend validation automation, result-capture, and regression frameworks (CI/CD) to run validation at scale.

- Author firmware-driven test plans and define coverage metrics across IP blocks and subsystems; execute functional, performance, and stress/corner-case testing.

- Validate and characterize custom IP blocks and accelerator components on both pre- and post-silicon platforms.

- Use debug consoles and lab tooling (JTAG, UART, logic/protocol analyzers) for silicon debug and characterization.

- Collaborate closely with design, verification, architecture, DFT, and driver teams to ensure a smooth transition from pre-silicon verification to post-silicon validation, and to feed silicon issues back into revisions and firmware/driver workarounds.

You may be a good fit if you have (Must-have qualifications)

- Proficiency in C/C++ for firmware and bare-metal development, plus Python for validation automation and scripting.

- Understanding of SoC/computer architecture (CPU cores, memory subsystems, caches, interconnects).

- Solid low-level/embedded fundamentals: bootloaders, hardware abstraction layers, device drivers, register/interrupt programming, and bare-metal or RTOS environments.

- Knowledge and familiarity developing and debugging in Linux environments.

- Strong problem-solving, analytical, and cross-functional collaboration skills across hardware and software teams.

- Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field (Master's a plus).

Strong candidates may also have experience with (Nice-to-have qualifications)

- 2+ years of experience developing firmware / embedded software for ASICs or SoCs

- Hands-on experience with silicon bring-up and low-level debug (boot, initialization, root-causing failures across firmware/electrical/protocol layers).

- Experience with JTAG and debuggers (e.g., Lauterbach/GDB) and serial/UART debug consoles.

- Experience across both pre-silicon (emulation, FPGA, RTL simulation) and post-silicon (lab bring-up, characterization) environments.

- Experience with one or more high-speed interfaces: PCIe, DDR/LPDDR/HBM, SerDes, or die-to-die / chiplet interconnect.

- Experience building test/validation automation and regression frameworks (CI/CD).

- RTOS experience (FreeRTOS, Zephyr, NuttX) or RISC-V firmware development.

- Familiarity with platform/system firmware (UEFI, ACPI, BMC, BIOS).

- Ability to read RTL (Verilog/SystemVerilog) and debug in simulation.

- Hands-on lab instrumentation experience (oscilloscopes, logic/protocol analyzers, BERTs) and signal-integrity awareness.

Benefits

- Medical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage - $500 per month credit for waiving medical benefits

- Housing subsidy of $2k per month for those living within walking distance of the office

- Relocation support for those moving to San Jose (Santana Row)

- Various wellness benefits covering fitness, mental health, and more

- Daily lunch and dinner in our office

- Unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification

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, 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.

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