Silicon Validation Engineer, Software

Job Summary

We are seeking a skilled and motivated Silicon Validation Firmware Engineer to develop the firmware and low-level software that validates our AI/ML accelerator ASICs across their entire Lifecycle, from pre-silicon emulation and FPGA prototyping through post-silicon bring-up, characterization, and production ramp. In this role you will build the validation firmware, test content, and automation that prove our silicon works, and you will be hands-on debugging real hardware in the lab. Your work directly enables functional correctness, performance, and reliability of our cutting-edge products.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and own low-level validation firmware in C/C++ that runs across emulation and physical silicon, providing test content pre-silicon and reusing it to drive post-silicon bring-up.

• Drive early bring-up of first silicon: boot, initialization, feature enablement, and debug of ASICs.

• Perform deep-dive debug of silicon issues spanning firmware, RTL, electrical, protocol, and system levels; root-cause and resolve failures.

• Build firmware infrastructure including hardware abstraction layers (HALs) and low-level device drivers for compute units, memory subsystems, and high-speed interfaces.

• Develop and extend validation automation, result-capture, and regression frameworks (CI/CD) to run validation at scale.

• Author firmware-driven test plans and define coverage metrics across IP blocks and subsystems; execute functional, performance, and stress/corner-case testing.

• Validate and characterize custom IP blocks and accelerator components on both pre- and post-silicon platforms.

• Use debug consoles and lab tooling (JTAG, UART, logic/protocol analyzers) for silicon debug and characterization.

• Collaborate closely with design, verification, architecture, DFT, and driver teams to ensure a smooth transition from pre-silicon verification to post-silicon validation, and to feed silicon issues back into revisions and firmware/driver workarounds.

You may be a good fit if you have (Must-have qualifications)

• Proficiency in C/C++ for firmware and bare-metal development, plus Python for validation automation and scripting.

• Understanding of SoC/computer architecture (CPU cores, memory subsystems, caches, interconnects).

• Solid low-level/embedded fundamentals: bootloaders, hardware abstraction layers, device drivers, register/interrupt programming, and bare-metal or RTOS environments.

• Knowledge and familiarity developing and debugging in Linux environments.

• Strong problem-solving, analytical, and cross-functional collaboration skills across hardware and software teams.

• Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field (Master's a plus).

Strong candidates may also have experience with (Nice-to-have qualifications)

• 2+ years of experience developing firmware / embedded software for ASICs or SoCs

• Hands-on experience with silicon bring-up and low-level debug (boot, initialization, root-causing failures across firmware/electrical/protocol layers).

• Experience with JTAG and debuggers (e.g., Lauterbach/GDB) and serial/UART debug consoles.

• Experience across both pre-silicon (emulation, FPGA, RTL simulation) and post-silicon (lab bring-up, characterization) environments.

• Experience with one or more high-speed interfaces: PCIe, DDR/LPDDR/HBM, SerDes, or die-to-die / chiplet interconnect.

• Experience building test/validation automation and regression frameworks (CI/CD).

• RTOS experience (FreeRTOS, Zephyr, NuttX) or RISC-V firmware development.

• Familiarity with platform/system firmware (UEFI, ACPI, BMC, BIOS).

• Ability to read RTL (Verilog/SystemVerilog) and debug in simulation.

• Hands-on lab instrumentation experience (oscilloscopes, logic/protocol analyzers, BERTs) and signal-integrity awareness.

Benefits

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

  • $500 per month credit for waiving medical benefits

• Housing subsidy of $2.5k 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, betting early on transformer and transformer-like architectures and on increasing model sizes. Our addressable market is the entirety of inference, unlike many of our competitors.