Capital Projects - Electrical Infrastructure 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

Own the electrical infrastructure that enables Etched to develop, test, and scale hardware from chip to rack to data center. As an individual contributor on the Capital Projects and Facilities Engineering team, you will translate evolving product requirements into practical electrical systems and drive projects from early planning and design through construction, commissioning, and operational handoff.

You will help establish our electrical standards, practice safe operations, build internal design capability, and accelerate decisions across new facilities and retrofits. You will serve as the electrical technical owner for assigned projects, develop internal concepts and preliminary designs, and direct technical work with consultants, contractors, and equipment vendors. External engineers of record will support detailed design and permitting where required.

We value strong fundamentals, practical judgment, and demonstrated ownership. Your experience may come from consulting, contracting, electrical trades, commissioning, facilities operations, military technical training, or another path. You should be comfortable with high velocity projects, working in the field, challenging assumptions, and turning incomplete or changing requirements into safe, executable solutions.

Key Responsibilities

- Translate stakeholder needs into electrical load forecasts, capacity plans, design criteria, and distribution concepts for bench, lab, rack test, and data center environments.

- Assess prospective sites and identify infrastructure constraints and expansion options.

- Develop single-line diagrams, load calculations, equipment requirements, and preliminary layouts. Evaluate distribution architectures and equipment including transformers, switchgear, UPS, generators, ATS, panelboards, busway, and rack power distribution.

- Lead technical reviews of consultant designs, equipment submittals, and field installations. Scope and review short-circuit, protection coordination, arc-flash, and power-quality studies with qualified design partners; resolve constructability, maintainability, and system integration issues.

- Own assigned electrical projects through scope definition, equipment selection, procurement support, construction coordination, commissioning, and handoff. Projects range from swapping receptacles to designing our pod. Develop BOM and specs, evaluate technical proposals, track cost and schedule impacts, and hold vendors accountable for deliverables.

- Rapidly assess changing requirements, identify downstream impacts, and recommend options that balance safety, capacity, reliability, cost, and schedule. Drive agreed changes into coordinated designs and field execution; communicate risks and decisions early.

- Define commissioning plans and acceptance criteria; coordinate energization, shutdowns, load testing, and integrated system testing with qualified personnel. Verify performance and drive deficiencies to closure.

- Troubleshoot electrical problems, lead root-cause investigations, and deliver corrective actions. Use metering, monitoring, and trend data to identify capacity and reliability risks before they affect development or operations.

- Partner with operations on electrical maintenance strategy, critical spares, training, and independently authored operating and maintenance procedures. Provide technical incident support and ensure complete as-builts, settings, test records, and handoff documentation.

- Build repeatable standards, design tools, and lessons learned; mentor teammates and improve how the team delivers infrastructure. Coordinate across disciplines and geographic regions as project needs evolve. Travel to project sites, including the wider bay area and beyond as Etched grows. Support planned shutdowns or commissioning outside normal business hours as needed.

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

- Strong applied electrical fundamentals and the ability to reason through power distribution, three-phase loads, grounding and bonding, protection, power quality, and failure modes.

- Demonstrated personal ownership across at least three areas: design, construction, commissioning, troubleshooting, or operations. Typically 5+ years of relevant experience; exceptional demonstrated capability matters more than a fixed tenure requirement.

- The ability to develop or critically review electrical designs, interpret drawings and specifications, quantify system constraints, and reconcile documentation with field conditions.

- A record of independently delivering meaningful technical work: explaining the problem, evaluating options, making decisions, and verifying the outcome.

- Practical knowledge of applicable electrical and building codes and safe electrical work practices, with sound judgment about when to involve licensed engineers or qualified specialists.

- Comfort with ambiguity, changing priorities, and multiple projects. You communicate clearly, challenge assumptions constructively, and make progress while managing risk.

- Relevant preparation through an electrical engineering degree, apprenticeship or trade progression, military technical training, field service, commissioning, or equivalent practical experience. A degree is not required.

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

Experience in one or more of the following is valuable; we do not expect every candidate to bring all of it:

- Mission-critical or high-power facilities; medium-voltage systems; redundancy strategies; utility coordination; brownfield upgrades or live-site cutovers.

- Electrical testing, protective relays, equipment startup, load-bank testing, or integrated systems commissioning; applicable trade, testing, commissioning, or professional engineering credentials.

- Power-system analysis, CAD/BIM, automation, or tools that improve design quality and turnaround; EPMS, BAS, or controls integration, including Tridium/Niagara and ALC

- Electrical safety program implementation and NFPA 70E training; reliability improvements, capacity planning, and technical vendor or project leadership.

Target Backgrounds

We welcome candidates from consulting engineering and design-build firms; electrical contractors and trades; testing and commissioning companies; switchgear, UPS, and other equipment manufacturers or field-service teams; data centers and critical facilities; industrial plants and utilities; semiconductor, biotech, and advanced manufacturing facilities; research laboratories; and military power systems.

Relevant titles may include Electrical Engineer, Electrical Designer, Commissioning Engineer, Field Service Engineer or Technician, Electrical Superintendent, Industrial Electrician, Relay or Test Technician, Critical Facilities Engineer, Chief Engineer, or Plant Engineer. What matters is the depth of your electrical expertise, your judgment, and what you have personally delivered.

Benefits

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

- $500 per month credit for waiving medical benefits

- Housing subsidy of $2,500 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

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 (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.