IT Support Specialist

About Etched

Etched is building AI chips that are hard-coded for individual model architectures. Our first product (Sohu) only supports transformers, but has an order of magnitude more throughput and lower latency than a B200. With Etched ASICs, you can build products that would be impossible with GPUs, like real-time video generation models and extremely deep chain-of-thought reasoning.

IT Support Specialist

Designing and writing drivers for new ASICs is hard, and requires a huge amount of compute infrastructure. It is even more challenging for model-specific ASICs, as market windows can be narrow. For this reason, it is important that our servers and emulators have very high uptime.

You will make sure this is the case. You will work with our hardware and software teams to make sure they can access compute resources, and ensure our CI tests run quickly. If they can't, you will work with them to decide what hardware to purchase to fix this. You will also help us set up and provision new servers and hardware, working with an IT team if necessary.

This role requires being on-call after work hours. An employee who performs well in this role could be promoted to an infrastructure performance engineer. This role does not require formal certifications or education credentials, although they help.

Representative projects:

• Debug and fix server outages as soon as they occur

• Automate the process of setting up accounts for new hires

• Spec out, manage, and install new servers

• Set up networking infrastructure to allow Jupyter notebook users to connect to our servers, without waiting for them to be restarted.

Requirements:

• Strong communication skills

• Experience building and maintaining local (or co-located) server clusters

• Have scripting experience

• Able to learn quickly about transformers and other aspects of modern artificial intelligence

Desired qualifications:

• Experience with cloud environments

How we're different:

Etched believes in the Bitter Lesson. We think most of the progress in the AI field has come from using more FLOPs to train and run models, and the best way to get more FLOPs is to build model-specific hardware. Larger and larger training runs encourage companies to consolidate around fewer model architectures, which creates a market for single-model ASICs.

We are a fully in-person team in Cupertino, 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 as needed.

Benefits:

• Full medical, dental, and vision packages, with 100% of premium covered, 90% for dependents

• Housing subsidy of $2,000/month for those living within walking distance of the office

• Daily lunch and dinner in our office

• Relocation support for those moving to Cupertino