Chip Simulation Lead

Job Title

Chip Simulation Lead

Role Summary

Lead technical direction and development of Etched's chip simulation infrastructure to enable pre-silicon software development, debugging, and hardware–software co-design. Manage the chip simulation team and collaborate with hardware architects, firmware, kernel, and software teams to prioritize work and resolve cross-domain technical challenges.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role focused on accuracy, performance, and maintainability of bit-accurate, cycle-aware simulators.

Experience Level

Senior-level role. Technical leadership and mentoring expected; specific years of experience not specified.

Responsibilities

Primary responsibilities include technical leadership, simulator architecture and integration, validation, and mentoring.

• Provide technical leadership and set the technical direction for the chip simulation team.
• Design, implement, and maintain bit-accurate and cycle-aware simulation models and infrastructure.
• Lead design and code reviews; establish and enforce engineering best practices and quality standards.
• Integrate simulated hardware with QEMU-based hosts to enable kernel driver and host software development.
• Define and drive multi-chip simulation architecture to validate scale-out and scale-up approaches.
• Develop and oversee validation and testing strategies to ensure simulator correctness versus hardware specifications.
• Diagnose and resolve cross-domain hardware–software issues; remain hands-on for critical implementations and prototyping.
• Mentor and support engineers to improve simulator accuracy and engineering velocity.

Requirements

Must-have technical skills and leadership experience; additional desirable skills listed separately.

• Must-have: Deep expertise in C/C++ and low-level systems software development.
• Strong understanding of computer architecture and hardware–software interfaces.
• Experience building or developing hardware simulators, architectural models, or other complex systems software.
• Proven experience leading technical projects, conducting design and code reviews, and mentoring engineers.
• Strong debugging and problem-solving skills across hardware and software boundaries.
• Track record of owning complex software systems from architecture through delivery.

Nice-to-have:

• Experience with SystemC, gem5, QEMU, or custom simulation frameworks.
• Cycle-accurate, cycle-aware, or bit-accurate hardware modeling; experience with AI accelerators, GPUs, CPUs, or SoCs.
• Firmware, kernel, or driver development experience (Linux or RTOS).
• Hardware verification and validation methodology experience; multithreaded/multiprocess simulation frameworks.
• Simulation performance profiling and optimization; Python-based testing infrastructure, Bazel, and Git.

Education Requirements

Not specified.

About the Company

Company: Etched

Headquarters: San Jose, CA, United States

Etched develops purpose-built AI inference ASICs and systems optimized for transformer models, aiming to deliver significantly higher performance, lower cost, and lower latency than GPUs. The company focuses on enabling applications like real-time video generation and advanced reasoning agents, and is backed by leading investors and engineers.