Emulation Engineer
US$150,000 – US$350,000 / yr base salary
Posted 1 Jun 2026
Advertised as “Emulation Engineer, Hardware Prototyping (HAPS)”
BranchFactor Summary
The original posting with the fluff stripped out
- Management level
- Individual contributor
- Employment
- On-Site
- Contract
- Full-time
| Base salary | US$150,000 – US$350,000 / yr |
|---|
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.
What you'll do
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Own HAPS bring-up. Take RTL from the design teams and get it running on the prototype — partitioning, multi-FPGA timing closure, clocking, memory mapping, and full-chip assembly.
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Expand platform coverage. Stand up new subsystem configurations so more of the chip is available to software earlier. Each new partition you enable unblocks a team.
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Support your users. Firmware, driver, and software engineers are your customers. You'll help them get running, triage their failures, and figure out whether the bug is theirs, the RTL's, or the platform's.
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Debug hard problems. Trace issues across FPGA boundaries with waveform capture, protocol analyzers, and whatever tooling you have to build yourself.
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Bring up interfaces. PCIe, Ethernet, HBM and memory models, JTAG, I2C, UART, QSPI — both the models and the physical bridges.
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Build the flows. Automate builds, regressions, and image delivery so the platform scales past the number of people who understand it.
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Work across the org. Design, DV, Silicon Validation, Performance, Firmware, and Software — plus direct partnership with Synopsys on tool issues and platform capability.
Representative projects
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Bring up a new subsystem partition on HAPS and get firmware booting on it end to end.
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Build a self-service flow that lets software users load and run their own images without prototyping support in the loop.
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Instrument deep trace capture across partition boundaries and build the tooling that surfaces it usefully.
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Create configurable chip-to-chip and off-chip interface models using prototyping-efficient primitives.
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Close timing on a partition that doesn't want to close, and document how you did it so the next person doesn't have to rediscover it.