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Etched is building custom silicon and systems for AI inference at scale. This role is a Silicon Validation Firmware Engineer responsible for developing and owning low-level validation firmware in C/C++ that proves AI/ML accelerator ASICs work correctly across their entire lifecycle—from pre-silicon emulation and FPGA prototyping through post-silicon bring-up, characterization, and production ramp.
Key responsibilities include: developing validation firmware and test content that runs on emulation and physical silicon; driving early bring-up of first silicon including boot, initialization, and feature enablement; performing deep-dive debug of silicon issues spanning firmware, RTL, electrical, and protocol layers; building firmware infrastructure including hardware abstraction layers and low-level device drivers for compute units, memory subsystems, and high-speed interfaces; developing validation automation, result-capture, and regression frameworks (CI/CD); authoring firmware-driven test plans and defining coverage metrics; validating and characterizing custom IP blocks; using debug consoles and lab tooling (JTAG, UART, logic/protocol analyzers); and collaborating with design, verification, architecture, DFT, and driver teams.
Must-have qualifications: proficiency in C/C++ for firmware and bare-metal development, plus Python for validation automation; understanding of SoC/computer architecture (CPU cores, memory subsystems, caches, interconnects); solid low-level/embedded fundamentals including bootloaders, HALs, device drivers, register/interrupt programming, and bare-metal or RTOS environments; knowledge of Linux development and debugging; strong problem-solving and cross-functional collaboration skills; Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field.
Nice-to-have qualifications include: 2+ years firmware/embedded software experience for ASICs or SoCs; hands-on silicon bring-up and low-level debug experience; JTAG and debugger experience (Lauterbach/GDB); experience with both pre-silicon (emulation, FPGA, RTL simulation) and post-silicon (lab bring-up, characterization) environments; experience with high-speed interfaces (PCIe, DDR/LPDDR/HBM, SerDes, chiplet interconnect); test/validation automation and CI/CD framework experience; RTOS experience (FreeRTOS, Zephyr, NuttX) or RISC-V firmware development; platform/system firmware familiarity (UEFI, ACPI, BMC, BIOS); ability to read RTL (Verilog/SystemVerilog); hands-on lab instrumentation experience (oscilloscopes, logic/protocol analyzers, BERTs).
Etched is a fully in-person team in San Jose (Santana Row) focused on inference-optimized AI systems. The company values engineering skills and expects technical staff to contribute across both engineering and research disciplines.
