People Operations Generalist

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

As we scale, we're looking for a hands-on People Operations Generalist to own the day-to-day employee experience, from offer letter to last day, and build the systems that let it scale. This role is ideal for someone who thrives in fast-paced, high-talent-density environments and would rather fix a broken process and build systems than route tickets.

What You'll Do

• Own the employee lifecycle end-to-end, including pre-hire, onboarding, new hire orientation, and offboarding, so hires are ready to go from day one

• Manage immigration processes for our team, partnering with outside counsel to keep cases on track

• Own Rippling as our HRIS, building workflows and reports and keeping employee data accurate

• Build and improve People systems and processes, automating repetitive work where we can

• Handle core People Ops work, from employee questions and leaves to compliance and offboarding

• Develop, implement, and maintain HR compliance programs, employee policies, and handbooks as the organization scales

• Analyze headcount, hiring, and engagement data, and turn it into clear recommendations for leadership

• Partner closely with Finance, Legal, IT, and Recruiting on cross-functional initiatives to mature company processes, policies, and operational efficiency

• Support employee recognition and team-building efforts, from celebrating wins to planning events that bring the team together

• Manage vendor relationships such as insurance and benefit brokers, including worker's compensation, legal counsel, and EORs

• Manage and support leave of absence, ADA accommodations, and employee relations related cases with care and discretion, partnering with Legal as needed

• Jump in wherever the team needs you as we grow, from new programs to one-off projects

You may be a good fit if you have

• Have 3 - 6 years of experience in People Operations, HR, or a generalist role, ideally at a fast-growing startup

• Have hands-on experience administering Rippling (or a similar HRIS), including workflows, reports, and integrations

• Have managed employment-based immigration cases (H-1B, O-1, green cards) alongside outside counsel

• Proficiency with modern workplace tools such as Jira, Slack, Ironclad, and GSuite

• Are comfortable with data and can turn a messy export into a clear report in spreadsheets

• Have working knowledge of California and federal employment law, leaves, and benefits administration

• Handle confidential information with sound judgment and discretion

• Thrive in ambiguity and enjoy building systems from scratch

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

• People Operations at a hardware, semiconductor, or AI-native company

• Supporting a team through rapid scaling, such as 500 to 1000+

• Experience with employee relations, including investigations and case management

• Global experience (APAC and/or EMEA) supporting people ops or entity

• Recruiting or ATS administration (Ashby or similar)

• Scripting, or no-code automation tools for People data and workflows

• Proficiency with leveraging AI tools such as Claude and Harvey.ai http://Harvey.ai

• Equity administration (Carta or similar)

Benefits

• Full medical, dental, and vision packages, with generous premium coverage

• Housing subsidy of $2,500/month for those living within walking distance of the office

• Daily catered lunch and dinner in our office

• Relocation support for those moving to West San Jose

Compensation Range

• $120,000 - $200,000

How we’re different

Etched believes in the Bitter Lesson http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html. We think most of the progress in the AI field has come from using more FLOPs to train and run models, and the best way to get more FLOPs is to build model-specific hardware. Larger and larger training runs encourage companies to consolidate around fewer model architectures, which creates a market for single-model ASICs.

We are a fully in-person team in West San Jose, and 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 as needed.