Head of Customer Engineering

About Etched

Etched is building AI chips that are hard-coded for individual model architectures. Our first product (Sohu) only supports transformers, but has an order of magnitude more throughput and lower latency than a B200. With Etched ASICs, you can build products that would be impossible with GPUs, like real-time video generation models and extremely deep & parallel chain-of-thought reasoning agents.

Job Summary

As the Head of Customer Engineering, you will lead the team responsible for ensuring successful customer onboarding, deployment, and long-term technical satisfaction. You will manage and scale a growing team of Application Engineers and various customer supporting roles. Serve as the executive technical point-of-contact for customer engagements—ensuring the organization delivers the people, tools, documentation, and escalation paths needed to support demanding AI infrastructure rollouts.

This is a hands-on leadership role that requires both strategic thinking and operational execution. You will own the customer technical experience while deeply partnering with cross-functional teams (hardware, software, systems, and product) to influence roadmap decisions and accelerate time-to-value for our customers.

Key responsibilities

• Leadership & Team Management

  • Build, lead, and mentor a high-performing Customer Engineering and Applications team, including regional field engineers and on-site deployment specialists.

  • Define and drive the team’s charter, structure, and processes to support pre-sales evaluations, deployment programs, escalations, and post-sales technical success.

  • Establish a strong culture of ownership, responsiveness, and continuous improvement.

• Customer Experience Ownership

  • Serve as a technical executive sponsor for key customer relationships, ensuring smooth onboarding, rapid integration, and scalable system support.

  • Champion the customer experience internally by aligning technical resources to support critical customer milestones and issue resolution.

  • Proactively identify and close gaps in customer enablement, support coverage, and system readiness.

• Program Development & Infrastructure

  • Oversee the creation and maintenance of all customer-facing documentation (e.g., system integration guides, rack power/network/thermal requirements, burn-in and diagnostics tools, software/firmware/CRU upgrade instructions).

  • Define RMA and field support workflows, including critical debug and escalation paths.

  • Develop scalable programs for training, diagnostics, and support tools to improve serviceability.

• Cross-Functional Collaboration

  • Act as a key partner to engineering, product, operations, and manufacturing teams to ensure customer insights drive roadmap priorities and support readiness.

  • Participate in cross-functional reviews to ensure new products are launch-ready with proper enablement and support.

  • Influence tools and infrastructure needed to scale deployments, including automation, telemetry, and remote monitoring.

• Field Readiness & Escalation

  • Oversee technical support for rack-scale deployments, including on-site support, lab validation, and issue triage.

  • Establish regional coverage strategies and travel policies for support team deployment.
    Manage high-priority escalations and represent the technical voice of the customer at all levels of the organization.

You may be a good fit if you have

• A Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field (MBA is a plus).

• 8–15+ years of experience in customer engineering, applications engineering, field support, or systems integration, with at least 3 years in a people management or technical leadership role.

• Proven success managing technical teams supporting complex hardware and software products in AI, semiconductor, or data center environments.

• Deep understanding of rack-scale system integration, power/network planning, diagnostics, and high-performance compute hardware.

• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to work effectively with engineers, executives, and customers.

• Willingness to travel (>30%) to customer sites across the U.S. and potentially internationally.

Benefits

• Full medical, dental, and vision packages, with generous pre