People Operations

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

The People Operations team architects and maintains the people systems, operating rhythms, and org design at Etched. You'll work directly with leadership to figure out how we organize, develop, and retain the best people as we rapidly scale in one of the world’s most important industries.

You'll own everything from org design and performance systems to people analytics and company culture. People are our most important asset at Etched: you'll learn how great startups are built, own important strategic people initiatives, and help drive some of the most critical decisions and workflows that determine how we organize and scale the business.

Key responsibilities

• Operations - Own payroll, benefits, and compliance. Work with legal and vendors to stay ahead of regulatory requirements. Keep people data accurate across all systems.

• Employee Inquiries: Field and resolve employee questions regarding reimbursements, payroll, benefits, and other HR-related matters, ensuring timely and accurate responses.

• People Systems - Build world-class onboarding and offboarding processes. Create performance management systems and compensation frameworks.

• People Analytics - Build dynamic dashboards to visualize and understand the employee lifecycle. Use data to understand performance patterns and org health.

You may be a good fit if you have (Must-have qualifications)

• A process-oriented mindset, with a track record of building systems that scale without requiring constant maintenance.

• A commitment to operational excellence, shaped by experience in high-ownership, high-pressure environments such as finance, consulting, or fast-growing startups.

• Strong strategic thinking skills, with an understanding of how talent decisions directly connect to business outcomes.

• A highly organized and detail-oriented approach — nothing slips through the cracks under your watch.

• Comfort working with data and building live dashboards and reports to drive clarity and decision-making.

• Exceptional communication skills, with the ability to engage and collaborate effectively at all levels of the organization.

• A high sense of ownership — you instinctively take initiative and tackle problems head-on.

Strong candidates may also have experience with (Nice-to-have qualifications)

• HR tools such as HRIS systems (e.g., Rippling), payroll platforms, or compliance solutions.

• Employment law, immigration, or cross-border employment issues.

• The AI ecosystem, semiconductors, or other complex technical products.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage

  • $500 per month credit for waiving medical benefits

• Housing subsidy of $2k per month for those living within walking distance of the office

• Relocation support for those moving to San Jose (Santana Row)

• Various wellness benefits covering fitness, mental health, and more

• Daily lunch and dinner in our office

• Unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification

Compensation

• $125,000 - $175,000

How we’re different

Etched believes in the Bitter Lesson. We are the first inference-focused frontier AI system, betting early on transformer and transformer-like architectures and on increasing model sizes. Our addressable market is the entirety of inference, unlike many of our competitors.

We are a fully in-person team in San Jose (Santana Row), 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 and work across disciplines as needed.