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Salary: USD 200,000 - 350,000 / annual
Etched is building custom hardware for frontier AI inference, co-designing chips, racks, software, and manufacturing to deliver best-in-class throughput and latency. The company is backed by hundreds of millions from top-tier investors and staffed by leading engineers.
You will own the thermal design and validation of Etched's L11 rack system—the liquid-cooled racks that carry inference hardware into customer datacenters. This role spans the full lifecycle: from design through deployment, including defining how racks are filled, commissioned, and brought online. You will validate reference CDU (Coolant Distribution Unit) systems, serve as the technical voice on facility integration for the go-to-market team and customers, and work closely with tray- and module-level thermal engineers, mechanical, electrical, and systems teams, and CDU and liquid-loop suppliers.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own thermal design and validation of the L11 rack system, including the rack-level liquid loop, manifolds, quick disconnects, and interfaces to facility cooling.
- Develop and document deployment, fill, and commissioning processes for liquid-cooled racks, from first fill and leak checks through bring-up at customer sites.
- Validate reference CDU systems by writing and executing test plans in the lab and field, and qualifying CDU partners on thermal performance, reliability, and controls.
- Characterize rack-level thermal and hydraulic performance (flow distribution, pressure drop, supply and return temperatures) and use results to drive design decisions.
- Define and validate cooling-loop control strategies and their interaction with datacenter facility control systems.
- Support GTM and customers as the technical point of contact on facility integration questions (facility water requirements, CDU selection and sizing, secondary loop design, water quality).
- Partner with tray and module thermal engineers to ensure server-level designs meet rack-level and facility constraints.
- Create and maintain rack thermal specifications, commissioning procedures, validation reports, and customer-facing facility requirements documents.
- Investigate and resolve thermal and fluid-related issues in the lab and in deployed systems.
The company is fully in-person in San Jose (Santana Row) and values engineering skills highly, with no boundaries between engineering and research. All technical staff are expected to contribute to both and work across disciplines.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5–10 years of experience in thermal or mechanical engineering with direct, hands-on CDU and datacenter liquid cooling experience.
- Experience installing, commissioning, or validating liquid cooling systems at datacenter scale.
- Experience with CDU validation and commissioning, including flow, pressure, temperature, and controls testing.
- Strong working knowledge of datacenter cooling loops (facility water and technology cooling system / secondary loops) and the control systems that run them.
- Comfort working directly with customers, facility teams, and suppliers to resolve integration issues.
- Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering, Thermal Engineering, or a related field.
NICE TO HAVE:
- Experience deploying rack-scale direct-to-chip liquid cooling for AI or HPC systems at a hyperscaler, server OEM, or CDU vendor.
- Familiarity with industry guidelines for datacenter liquid cooling, such as OCP and ASHRAE TC 9.9.
- Experience with 1D flow network or system-level thermal/hydraulic modeling tools (e.g., Flownex, MacroFlow).
- Knowledge of coolant chemistry, filtration, leak detection, and fluid integrity testing.
