Power Validation 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

We are looking for a Power Validation Engineer to own the end-to-end power characterization of our ASIC and the mezzanine card platform — from early silicon bring-up through production qualification. You will design measurement methodology, build test benches, and drive findings directly into silicon, package, and system design decisions.

Key Responsibilities

- Design and execute power measurement campaigns across all voltage rails (VDD_CORE, HBM, PCIe, AUX, etc) under realistic LLM inference and power virus workloads; characterize peak, sustained, and idle power envelopes across PVT corners and define derating curves used in system thermal and PDN specs

- Validate power delivery network (PDN) performance — VRM load step response, PCIe power compliance, PDN impedance — and translate measurements into actionable feedback on capacitor placement, plane geometry, and de-cap strategy for PCB and package design teams

- Profile power transient events (ramp rates, droop amplitudes, recovery profiles) and correlate them with on-die performance monitor data; build automated power sweep frameworks exercising the full inference workload space across model sizes, batch sizes, sequence lengths, and precision modes

- Run extended stress workloads (72 h+ continuous) to surface reliability risks and throttling behavior; instrument multi-zone thermal profiles and support our overseas partners with SLT, production and debugging.

- Validate power sequencing, PMBus telemetry accuracy, and BMC alert thresholds across cold-start, hot-restart, and fault-injection scenarios; own power-related pass/fail criteria across FAT, SFT, and RIN qualification stages

- Feed characterization data back to RTL and physical design teams as input for DVFS policy, clock gating coverage, and leakage optimization; write precise validation reports that enable silicon and firmware teams to act without re-running experiments

- Lead the electrical characterization, validation, and qualification process for the on-board system-level power distribution network, spanning from power converter design to ASIC power integrity validation.

- Provide critical support to design engineers through debug, component validation, and failure analysis for released products, independently troubleshooting and determining the root cause of electrical component defects and design flaws.

- Develop and implement automated/scripted test procedures for the general qualification and testing of Devices Under Test (DUTs) as part of a comprehensive automation suite.