Security Engineer | Safeguarding the Future of AI Hardware
About Etched
Etched is at the vanguard of AI innovation, building the world’s first AI inference system purpose-built for transformers. Our groundbreaking ASICs deliver over 10x higher performance and dramatically lower cost and latency compared to a B200. This enables products previously thought impossible, such as real-time video generation models and extremely deep & parallel chain-of-thought reasoning agents.
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. Join us and shape the future of AI computing.
The Mission: Security & Innovation at Speed
At Etched, the pursuit of groundbreaking AI hardware demands an equally robust, yet frictionless, security posture. As a Security Engineer, you will be the guardian of our intellectual property, high-performance compute clusters, and developer workflows, spanning both our cutting-edge on-prem and dynamic cloud environments.
This role offers a unique opportunity to blend deep hands-on technical expertise with strategic impact. You will architect, implement, and operate the advanced monitoring, detection, and response infrastructure that protects our most critical assets. Partnering closely with infrastructure, IT, application, and external provider teams, you'll ensure security is woven into the fabric of our systems – secure by design, resilient under pressure, and seamlessly integrated into our engineers' workflows.
You will take full ownership of Etched’s security posture, driving proactive threat detection, real-time monitoring, and rapid incident response. Your decisions will critically balance firm-wide velocity with an ever-improving defense. We expect you to develop innovative tools, automation, and AI agents that scale with our rapid growth, ensuring security enhances, rather than hinders, our relentless pursuit of innovation. If you thrive on precision, ownership, and making a profound impact on the future of AI, Etched is your ideal environment.
Key Responsibilities
Fortify Environments: Manage and harden security baselines across on-prem, hybrid, and cloud systems, ensuring robust protection without compromising speed or usability.
Unified Observability: Integrate telemetry, logging, tracing, and management of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data across the entire environment, providing unified and comprehensive observability into infrastructure and application activity.
Proactive Vulnerability Management: Lead vulnerability management, patching, and configuration assurance programs to minimize exposure and maintain a consistent security posture.
Identity & Access Control: Partner with infrastructure, IT, and application teams to strengthen identity, access, and network security through expert configuration and management of Okta, Google Workspace, and FreeIPA.
Zero-Trust Architecture: Implement and maintain zero-trust network architectures, SASE controls, CASB solutions, and conditional access policies to protect users and data across all environments, ensuring full access and control of our data and IP regardless of location or device.
Advanced SecOps Tooling: Operate and enhance security operations tooling, including SIEM, SOAR, and EDR/XDR platforms, ensuring comprehensive monitoring and rapid threat detection.
Detection & Response Engineering: Develop and tune sophisticated detection logic, automation, and playbooks for identifying and responding to advanced threats such as insider activity, lateral movement, and anomalous behavior.
Incident Response Leadership: Investigate and respond to security incidents, performing root-cause analysis, containment, and remediation while coordinating seamlessly with engineering and IT.
Security Automation: Build automation, scripts, AI agents, and integrations that streamline monitoring, alerting, and remediation workflows to dramatically improve efficiency and reliability.
Metrics & Reporting: Establish clear metrics, dashboards, and feedback mechanisms to measure detection coverage, response time, and overall security health.
Security Culture Advocate: Promote a strong culture of security awareness and ownership across engineering teams, ensuring protection and productivity advance hand-in-hand.
Representative Projects You Might Tackle
Implementing a centralized security telemetry pipeline that aggregates logs and signals from networks, compute clusters, storage, endpoint devices, build systems, and cloud services into a unified SIEM for improved detection coverage.
Designing and developing Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) workflows to automate repetitive tasks like alert triage, data gathering, and initial containment, significantly improving SOC efficiency.
Help build a secure and flexible end-user access framework utilizing SDWAN, SASE, CASB, conditional access, EDR/XDR, and MDM/MAM to support productive, friction-free, and secure work from any location using various devices.
Network Security Monitoring: Configuring and monitoring network intrusion detection/prevention systems (IDS/IPS) and firewalls to detect anomalies in network traffic, especially on SDWAN and client VPN links.
Creating and refining detailed, documented incident response plans and playbooks tailored to specific scenarios, such as a breach in a lab environment or a compromised silicon testing machine.
Conducting regular vulnerability assessments and penetration testing on internal systems and applications, then coordinating with relevant teams to manage and remediate identified weaknesses.
What You'll Bring
5-7+ years of experience in security engineering, SOC operations, detection engineering, incident response, or a similar role that blends hands-on technical work with analytical problem-solving.
Strong software engineering skills with Python, Go, Bash (C and Rust are a major plus), including the ability to design, implement, and maintain high-quality code, automation frameworks, services, and integrations that improve security, observability, and operational efficiency.
Proficiency with SIEM and SOAR platforms, including extensive experience building detections, dashboards, and automated workflows.
Deep understanding of EDR and XDR platforms, endpoint security hardening, and telemetry collection across macOS, Linux, Windows, and server environments.
Proven experience implementing or supporting zero-trust architectures, including conditional access, SASE, CASB, and identity-driven access control models.
Familiarity with IAM and SSO systems such as Okta, Google Workspace, and FreeIPA, with the ability to design secure identity, access, and authentication policies.
Strong networking knowledge, including SDWAN, VPN, IDS/IPS, firewall administration, segmentation strategy, and monitoring of network traffic for anomalies.
Hands-on experience managing or building security telemetry pipelines, log ingestion frameworks, or observability systems that support both structured and unstructured data.
Solid understanding of threat modeling, the MITRE ATT&CK framework, attacker tradecraft, and common detection and response patterns.
Experience performing vulnerability assessments, penetration testing, or secure configuration reviews and collaborating with teams to remediate identified risks.
Exposure to cloud and hybrid environments such as AWS, GCP, or on-prem clusters, and the ability to evaluate risks and implement protective controls across these environments.
Why Join Etched?
Comprehensive Benefits: Full medical, dental, and vision packages, with generous premium coverage.
Housing Support: A substantial housing subsidy of $2,000/month for those living within walking distance of our office.
Daily Meals: Enjoy complimentary lunch and dinner in our office.
Relocation Assistance: Full relocation support for those moving to San Jose (Santana Row).
Our Unique Edge
Etched firmly believes in the Bitter Lesson. We posit that the most significant advancements in AI stem from leveraging more FLOPs for model training and inference. Our strategy is to achieve this by building model-specific hardware, where ever-larger training runs naturally consolidate around fewer model architectures, creating a prime market for single-model ASICs.
We are a fully in-person team based in San Jose (Santana Row), deeply valuing engineering excellence. We operate without boundaries between engineering and research, expecting all our technical staff to contribute across both domains as needed.