Node Systems Lead
Etched is an AI-hardware company building rack-scale frontier inference clusters.
Maintainer signals as of 9/25/2026
Funding history
About Etched
Etched co-designs chips, racks, software, and manufacturing systems for efficient inference of frontier AI models, targeting throughput, latency, cost, and power efficiency across prefill and decode workloads.
Skills
Candidate Availability
Required and preferred rules are kept separate and reflect the wording in the original posting.
About the Role
You will lead the Node Systems team and define the technical direction for host software, system configuration, and rack interfaces. You will optimize CPU scheduling, memory, networking, and accelerator communication, develop diagnostics, partner across hardware and software functions, and remain hands-on in design and debugging.
Requirements
- Experience developing and debugging production systems software in C, C++, or Rust on Linux.
- Experience leading technical projects and mentoring engineers while remaining hands-on.
- Understanding of operating systems fundamentals, including scheduling, concurrency, memory management, and I/O.
- Ability to investigate real-hardware performance issues and validate improvements through profiling and measurement.
- Experience taking system software or performance improvements from prototype to production deployment.
- Understanding of hardware and software interactions across application, kernel, and device boundaries.
- Ability to translate workload requirements into system changes with hardware and software teams.
Responsibilities
- Lead and develop the Node Systems team, set priorities, and establish ownership.
- Set technical direction for host software, system configuration, and rack component interfaces.
- Guide performance work across CPU scheduling, memory, networking, and host-to-accelerator communication.
- Turn system optimizations into tested, maintainable software and deployment-ready configurations.
- Lead development of rack simulation and diagnostic capabilities.
- Partner with inference software, firmware, and hardware teams on system architecture.
- Align configurations and interfaces with Fleet Software for cluster management and monitoring.
- Establish software baselines and test coverage with manufacturing and test engineering.
- Contribute to design reviews, code, and hands-on debugging.
Benefits
- Medical, dental, and vision coverage
- $500 per month credit for waiving medical benefits
- $2,500 per month housing subsidy for employees living within walking distance of the office
- Relocation support for moves to San Jose
- Wellness benefits covering fitness and mental health
- Daily office lunch and dinner
- Unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification