Chip Simulation Software Engineer - San Jose, United States

Originally posted 13 May 2026 by the employer. Relisted by the employer on 20 October 2026.

Develop simulations of custom AI inference chips to enable early software stack development and hardware-software co-design.

About the role

As a Chip Simulation Software Engineer at Etched, you will design, develop, and test simulations of custom hardware to enable early development of the software stack. The role supports hardware-software co-design for custom AI inference chips.

What you'll do

- Design, develop, and maintain simulations of custom hardware, ensuring accuracy, efficient debugging, and performance. - Influence architectural decisions through review and hardware-software co-design. - Create and maintain test plans, working with hardware teams to validate documentation. - Build tools to debug simulations and enable developers to debug software running on the simulator. - Implement simulations of on-chip modules and integrate simulated chips with simulated hosts such as QEMU. - Integrate multiple simulated chips to validate multi-chip software scale-out and scale-up configurations.

What you'll need

- Proficiency in C/C++. - Understanding of low-level software engineering. - Understanding of hardware engineering.

Nice to have

- Experience developing hardware or system simulations, such as SystemC, gem5, QEMU, or custom frameworks. - Experience with custom ML hardware accelerators. - Experience with firmware, kernel, and driver development, including Linux or FreeRTOS. - Experience with hardware development and verification. - Experience with multiprocessing, multithreading, and performance profiling and optimization of simulation code. - Familiarity with bit-accurate numerics modeling. - Proficiency with Python for test harness development, Bazel, and Git.

Skills: C/C++, hardware simulation, SystemC, ML accelerators, firmware