Head of Customer Engineering

Job Summary

Etched is seeking a Head of Customer Engineering to lead the organization responsible for ensuring our customers achieve seamless deployment, stable operations, and rapid success with Etched systems. This role bridges our technical engineering functions with the customer-facing organization, serving as the central coordination point across field engineering, fulfillment, and software integration teams.

This is a hands‑on leadership role for someone who thrives in dynamic environments, can manage complex rack‑scale deployments, and is equally comfortable triaging field issues as they are coordinating with product and software engineering. The ideal candidate has directly managed Field Application Engineers (FAEs) or Customer Engineers and can scale a function that owns customer success from install to production performance.

Key Responsibilities

Leadership & Team Development

• Build and manage a high‑performing Customer Engineering organization covering both hardware and system software support, including FAEs, on‑site deployment engineers, and software‑focused application engineers.
• Hire and mentor engineers who are hands‑on and capable of operating across data center environments, networking, and performance validation.
• Define how customer engineering interacts with Customer Program Management (CPM) and Go‑To‑Market (GTM) teams to ensure accountability and clarity on ownership.
• Champion documentation ownership across the team—ensuring processes, deployment guides, triage playbooks, and postmortems are consistently maintained, reviewed, and version‑controlled for accuracy and scalability.

Customer Experience & Ownership

Software & System Integration

Cross‑Functional Collaboration

Field Readiness & Escalation

Qualifications

Compensation Range

How we’re different

Etched believes in Bitter Lesson. We think most of the progress in the AI field has come from using more FLOPs to train and run models, and the best way to get more FLOPs is to build model‑specific hardware. Larger and larger training runs encourage companies to consolidate around fewer model architectures, which creates a market for single‑model ASICs.

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 as needed.

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