Lab Technician (Contractor)

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're looking for a hands-on Lab Technician to support our hardware development and validation efforts. As a Lab Technician, you'll build, integrate, and debug prototype servers and racks — assembling boards into chassis, routing power and signal cabling, and getting systems to mechanical bring-up so engineers can start testing. In this role, you'll also own the execution of test procedures, maintain rigorous documentation standards, and keep our lab environments running smoothly across multiple concurrent projects. You'll work closely with lab operations team and hardware engineers to ensure data integrity and help us move fast without cutting corners.

Key Responsibilities

• Prepare mechanical set-ups, test benches, fixtures, and lab environments to support platform validation, inference kernal development, firmware engineering and more across multiple concurrent projects
• Collect, record, and validate system health data, maintaining accurate and traceable documentation for analysis and quality assurance
• Monitor equipment performance, identifying anomalies and troubleshooting issues to maintain system integrity and minimize downtime
• Organize and maintain lab logs, test databases, and results reports, communicating findings clearly to hardware engineers and project teams
• Enforce lab safety procedures and compliance standards while managing equipment maintenance, inventory, and calibration schedules

Must-Have Qualifications

• Experience preparing test benches and hardware fixtures across multiple concurrent projects
• Strong data collection and documentation habits — accurate, traceable records are second nature to you
• Comfort organizing and maintaining lab logs, databases, and test reports for a cross-functional engineering audience

Nice-to-Have Qualifications

• Familiarity with lab safety compliance and managing equipment maintenance, inventory, and calibration schedules

Benefits

• Daily lunch and dinner in our office

How we’re different
Etched believes in the Bitter Lesson http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html. 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 and Taipei, 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.