Etched
Silicon Validation Engineer, Software
San Jose · On-site · Full-time · Posted Sep 3, 2026
- Experience
- 2+ years is listed as a nice-to-have; no minimum years requirement stated.
- Education
- Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field (Master's a plus).
About the job
Develops firmware, test content, and automation to validate AI/ML accelerator ASICs from pre-silicon emulation and FPGA prototyping through silicon bring-up, characterization, and production ramp.
What you'll do
- Develop low-level C/C++ validation firmware, hardware abstraction layers, and device drivers for emulation and physical silicon.
- Bring up and debug ASICs; investigate failures across firmware, RTL, electrical, protocol, and system levels.
- Build validation automation and regression frameworks, and define and execute test plans and coverage metrics.
What they ask for
- Proficiency in C/C++ for firmware and bare-metal development, plus Python for validation automation and scripting.
- Understanding of SoC/computer architecture, including CPU cores, memory subsystems, caches, and interconnects.
- Low-level/embedded fundamentals including bootloaders, hardware abstraction layers, device drivers, register/interrupt programming, and bare-metal or RTOS environments.
- Knowledge and familiarity developing and debugging in Linux environments; bachelor's degree in a related field is also required.
Nice to have
- 2+ years of firmware/embedded software development for ASICs or SoCs.
- Experience with silicon bring-up and low-level debug.
Tools
C/C++, Python, Linux, JTAG, UART, CI/CD, PCIe, DDR/LPDDR/HBM
AI focus
Validates AI/ML accelerator ASICs used for inference.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative