Forward Deployed Systems Engineer

About the 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 As a Forward Deployed Systems Engineer (Datacenter), you will work hands-on in large-scale datacenter environments to bring up, validate, and debug Etched accelerator-based systems. You’ll own customer deployment execution end-to-end, solve complex hardware/software/networking issues under real-world constraints, and build the tooling and processes that make deployments scalable and repeatable.

Key Responsibilities

Technical problem solving & diagnostics

- Drive deployments with customers and internal teams to identify risks and establish success criteria

- Debug and resolve system-level issues across hardware, firmware, drivers, Linux OS, and networking stacks

- Perform root-cause analysis on field issues and partner with internal engineering teams to reproduce issues and ship fixes

- Build and maintain diagnostics, monitoring/telemetry, and dashboards to improve visibility into system health

Firmware & system updates

- Coordinate firmware updates, hotfixes, and configuration changes to improve reliability and unblock customer deployments

- Manage update rollouts with minimal downtime and clear communication to customers and internal teams

Documentation & knowledge management

- Create and maintain deployment runbooks, escalation playbooks, known-issues documentation, and field service guides

- Capture structured learnings from deployments and convert them into repeatable processes

Cross-functional collaboration

- Partner with firmware/software/hardware engineering teams to drive reliability improvements

- Collaborate with Deployment, RMA, Sustaining Engineering, and Support teams to ensure smooth handoffs and long-term supportability

Process improvement & scaling

- Improve deployment workflows, metrics, and best practices to reduce deployment risk, time, and cost

- Identify patterns across deployments and drive process/tooling improvements that scale across customers

You may be a good fit if you have

- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience)

- Experience supporting datacenter customers in systems, networking, AI infrastructure, or field engineering roles

- Deep experience with Linux/Unix installation, configuration, debugging, and performance tuning

- Strong networking fundamentals including TCP/IP, RDMA, and low-latency Ethernet Hands-on experience with high-speed networking such as 100GbE / 400GbE