Citadel, HRT & Two Sigma people are joining this chip manufacturer with 100+ jobs open
If you haven't been paying attention, it's no longer about the Magnificent 7 tech stocks, it's about chip manufacturers. Micron, Intel and AMD added a combined two trillion to their market cap in the second quarter. The action is in hardware and particularly in inference chips designed to run AI models.
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Micron, Intel, AMD and Nvidia are already publicly listed companies. But what if you could join an emergent privately owned chip manufacturer, based in San Jose, California and backed by Jane Street, Hudson River Trading (HRT), Two Sigma and Jump? What if that chip manufacturer had 100+ jobs open right now? And what if it leaving your finance job and going there allowed you to avoid your non-compete?
Several people at top trading houses appear to have asked themselves these questions and decided that Etched, a California-based manufacturer of chips, racks and software, is a good bet. Since it was founded in 2023, Etched has hired 400 people. A handful have come from financial services, but that handful is likely to increase. Etched is out of stealth mode. It is hiring.
In the 100 or so jobs it has open, Etched is looking for everything from thermal engineers to electrical engineers, security engineers, and a head of supercomputing. Out of stealth, it claims to be building low latency chips which use power efficiently for the inference workloads associated with AI. These chips can be run at low voltages to avoid thermal issues. Etched says it has also designed a new architecture with a shared low latency memory pool that avoids the need to route tokens through different networks when there are bottlenecks.
Ultimately, it's conceivable that Etched's chips will be used by the electronic trading firms that are its investors. This might explain the enthusiasm among some industry employees for climbing on board. Current Etched employees include: Ahmed Kamil from Citadel's credit research team; Tim Perevozchikov from Two Sigma's quant trading team; Per Karlström, an FPGA developer from HRT; and Behrouz Tabaee, a former head of transformation of technology infrastructure from hedge fund Millennium.
None appear to have sat out on prolonged non-competes before joining. Speaking last year, Joe Long at Edge Executive Search in San Francisco, told us top engineers at trading firms were joining AI start-ups for equity that "could be worth $100m+." Because these start-ups aren't direct competitors, people can get paid by previous financial services employers during their non-competes while also drawing a salary at the AI firm, said Long. This is known as "double dipping."
Chip manufacturing jobs are increasingly popular. Clive Chan recently left OpenAI to help build Anthropic's new chips.
For the moment, Etched has one office in San Jose and it likes its people there five days a week. It's raised $800m and has $1bn in customer contracts. If you get an interview make sure you have read this essay from 2019 which explains the founders' belief in the "bitter lesson" principle, which says that the best solutions are general and leverage computation instead of seeking human-biased short cuts.
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