Head of Legal

Job Description

Job Description

About Etched

Etched is building AI chips that are hard-coded for individual model architectures. Our first product (Sohu) only supports transformers, but has an order of magnitude more throughput and lower latency than a B200. With Etched ASICs, you can build products that would be impossible with GPUs, like real-time video generation models and extremely deep chain-of-thought reasoning.

Head of Legal :

Etched is seeking a Head of Legal to lead all legal operations as we develop next-generation AI hardware. You will own our commercial agreements, structure legal processes, and serve as a key strategic partner to the executive team. As Etched's founding legal leader, you will build and scale our legal function, developing both the immediate infrastructure and long-term strategic vision

Representative Projects :

• Advise on a broad range of legal matters including commercial agreements, corporate governance, intellectual property, and employment law
• Design and negotiate complex commercial contracts including supplier agreements, customer deals, and IP licensing
• Work closely with the finance, sales, and operations teams to structure deals, transactions, and relationships with customers and vendors
• Build efficient legal processes and systems to support rapid company growth
• Support employment matters including visa sponsorship, compensation, and general employment law compliance
• Lead equity compensation programs and support corporate governance matters
• Collaborate with external counsel on specialized technical matters
• Structure compliance frameworks across the organization
• Provide strategic counsel to executive team on matters such as risk management and legal strategy

You maybe a good fit if you have

Strong candidates may also have experience with :

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification.

How we're different :

Etched believes in the Bitter Lesson. 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 Cupertino, 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.

Benefits :