Silicon Validation Engineer

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 seeking a skilled and motivated Silicon Validation Firmware Engineer to develop the firmware and low-level software that validates our AI/ML accelerator ASICs across their entire Lifecycle, from pre-silicon emulation and FPGA prototyping through post-silicon bring-up, characterization, and production ramp. In this role you will build the validation firmware, test content, and automation that prove our silicon works, and you will be hands-on debugging real hardware in the lab. Your work directly enables functional correctness, performance, and reliability of our cutting-edge products.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and own low-level validation firmware in C/C++ that runs across emulation and physical silicon, providing test content pre-silicon and reusing it to drive post-silicon bring-up.

• Drive early bring-up of first silicon: boot, initialization, feature enablement, and debug of ASICs.

• Perform deep-dive debug of silicon issues spanning firmware, RTL, electrical, protocol, and system levels; root-cause and resolve failures.

• Build firmware infrastructure including hardware abstraction layers (HALs) and low-level device drivers for compute units, memory subsystems, and high-speed interfaces.

• Develop and extend validation automation, result-capture, and regression frameworks (CI/CD) to run validation at scale.

• Author firmware-driven test plans and define coverage metrics across IP blocks and subsystems; execute functional, performance, and stress/corner-case testing.

• Validate and characterize custom IP blocks and accelerator components on both pre- and post-silicon platforms.

• Use debug consoles and lab tooling (JTAG, UART, logic/protocol analyzers) for silicon debug and characterization.

• Collaborate closely with design, verification, architecture, DFT, and driver teams to ensure a smooth transition from pre-silicon verification to post-silicon validation, and to feed silicon issues back into revisions and firmware/driver workarounds.