Chip Simulation Software Engineer
EtchedJob Title
Chip Simulation Software Engineer
Role Summary
Design and develop cycle-accurate and performance simulations of Etched's custom AI inference hardware to enable hardware-software co-design and early software development. The chip simulation team enables early development of the full software stack and validates architecture through simulation-driven feedback.
This is an in-person role based in San Jose (Santana Row).
Experience Level
Mid-level. No explicit years-of-experience requirement stated; prior experience in low-level software and hardware-related engineering is expected.
Responsibilities
Primary responsibilities include building accurate simulators, validating hardware designs, and enabling software development against simulated platforms.
- Design, implement, and maintain high-accuracy simulations of on-chip modules.
- Ensure simulator correctness, performance, and debuggability; build debugging tools and test harnesses.
- Collaborate with hardware teams to validate documentation and test plans.
- Influence microarchitecture and system-level design through simulation-driven input.
- Integrate simulated chips with simulated hosts (e.g., QEMU) to support kernel/driver and host software development.
- Support multi-chip integration and validate software scale-out and scale-up approaches.
- Profile and optimize simulation performance to enable efficient software development on the simulator.
Requirements
Core technical requirements and preferred qualifications.
Must-have
- Proficiency in C and C++.
- Strong low-level software engineering skills (firmware/kernel/driver familiarity preferred).
- Strong understanding of hardware concepts and hardware-software co-design.
- Good communication and collaboration skills.
Nice-to-have
- Experience with hardware/system simulators (SystemC, gem5, QEMU, or custom frameworks).
- Experience with ML hardware accelerators (e.g., Google TPU) or custom accelerators.
- Experience with firmware, kernel, and driver development (Linux, FreeRTOS).
- Experience with hardware development and verification, multiprocessing, and multithreading.
- Familiarity with bit-accurate numeric modeling, performance profiling, Python for test harnesses, 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.
