Facilities Engineering Operations Lead, Data Center

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

Etched is building a new category of AI hardware: frontier inference clusters. As our Facilities Engineering Operations Lead, you will own day-to-day operations of our AI data center: uptime, incident response, and escalation across power, cooling, and the white space. You'll be the first hire in this function and will build the operating system from scratch, including procedures, maintenance programs, on-call, and alarming, then turn it into the playbook we copy to every site that follows.

Key Responsibilities

• Own day-to-day data center operations end to end: uptime, incident response, and escalation for power, cooling, and the white space.

• Build the operating system from scratch: SOPs, MOPs, and EOPs; change management; preventive and predictive maintenance schedules; shift coverage and on-call; incident and RCA process.

• Define SLOs and response plans for outage events at the fleet, rack, and server level.

• Run the liquid cooling plant for high-density racks, including CDUs, secondary fluid loops, water chemistry and filtration, leak detection, and flow and inlet-temperature monitoring.

• Own electrical operations, including switchgear, busway and PDUs, power connector topology, load balancing across racks, and lockout/tagout (LOTO) and arc-flash safety.

• Manage electrical, mechanical, CDU OEM, and fire/life safety vendors and contractors: scope work, review quotes, and oversee onsite work.

• Stand up monitoring and alarming with engineering across BMS/DCIM and rack and CDU telemetry, so problems reach the right person within minutes, not hours.

• Run rack deployment logistics: receiving, staging, install, commissioning, and turn-up handoff to the hardware and lab teams, plus decommissioning and RMA flows.

• Track spares and critical parts inventory for facility equipment.

• Report operational metrics to leadership, including uptime, PUE, incidents, open risks, and capacity headroom.

• Help build the team, starting with facilities engineering technicians and a BMS specialist.

• Design processes and site-readiness checklists that can be replicated at our next sites.

• 4-8+ years in critical facilities and data center operations, including time as a Lead or Senior Critical Facilities Engineer or a single-site Facilities Manager

• Hands-on experience operating liquid cooling in production (CDUs, direct-to-chip / DLC, secondary fluid loops)

• Deep working knowledge of data center electrical distribution (switchgear, UPS, busway, PDUs) and safe work practices (LOTO, arc flash, NFPA 70E)

• Experience writing and drilling SOPs, MOPs, and EOPs, and running change management and maintenance programs

• Experience leading incident response and root cause analysis

• A track record of managing mechanical, electrical, and fire/life safety vendors

• Working knowledge of BMS, DCIM, and power monitoring systems

• Readiness to own the whole site, not just a shift or a system

• Deeply creative and able to think from first principles

Strong candidates may also have experience with

• Running high-density GPU / AI infrastructure at a neocloud, hyperscaler, or colocation provider

• Standing up a new site or data hall, including commissioning and turn-up

• Building and staffing 24/7 operations and on-call rotations

• Familiarity with modern ML and LLM model architectures

• Ability to program with Python or another scripting language

• Familiarity with AI tools for programming/coding

• Startup experience or comfort working in fast-paced environments

Benefits

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

• Housing subsidy of $2k per month for those living within walking distance of the office

• Daily lunch and dinner in our office

• Unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification

How we're different

Etched believes in the Bitter Lesson. We are the first inference-focused frontier AI system. Our addressable market is the entirety of inference, unlike many of our competitors.

We 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.

This role is onsite in the Bay Area at our data center and Milpitas sites, with regular time at our San Jose headquarters.

Compensation Range

$150,000 - $250,000, plus equity