Contracts Manager

Etched is building AI chips that are hard coded for individual model architectures. Our first product, Sohu, only supports transformers, but delivers an order of magnitude more throughput and lower latency than a B200. With Etched ASICs, teams can build products that are impossible on GPUs, including real time video generation and extremely deep, parallel chain of thought reasoning systems. Etched is an infrastructure driven company. Capital allocation, financing structure, and execution discipline directly shape our ability to scale, compute, deploy capacity, and move faster than incumbents.

We are hiring a Contracts & Commercial Operations Manager to own Etched’s commercial contracting infrastructure. In this role, you will review, draft, negotiate, and manage agreements with customers, vendors, and strategic partners while building the systems and processes that allow the company to execute contracts quickly as we scale. You will manage the contract lifecycle end-to-end and partner closely with Sales, Engineering, Finance, and leadership on major commercial transactions.

This is a hands-on role focused on both deal execution and operational ownership of contracting systems.

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  Draft, review, and negotiate commercial agreements including NDAs, MSAs, SaaS/software agreements, vendor agreements, services agreements, and technology licensing agreements.

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  Manage the contract lifecycle from intake through execution, storage, and reporting.

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  Build and maintain contract templates, clause libraries, and negotiation playbooks.

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  Operate and improve the company’s contract lifecycle management system (CLM).

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  Support customer, vendor, and strategic partnership agreements.

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  Be the internal point of contact for contract support to assist in resolving issues and drive contracts to completion.

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  Coordinate with Sales, Engineering, Finance, and leadership to structure and execute commercial deals.

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  Track contract status, maintain contract records, and produce reporting on agreements.

• 5+ years experience in contract management, legal operations, or commercial transactions.

• Bachelor’s degree is required and paralegal certification/J.D. is preferred.

• Experience drafting and negotiating NDAs, MSAs, SaaS/software agreements, vendor agreements, and licensing agreements.

• Experience in startups or other dynamic environments.

• Experience using contract lifecycle management systems such as DocuSign CLM, Ironclad, or Agiloft.

• Strong understanding of commercial contract terms including indemnification, liability caps, IP ownership, confidentiality, and termination.

• Strong interpersonal skills and ability to effectively communicate legal issues across different teams.

• Experience maintaining contract repositories and managing approval workflows.

• Proficiency with Excel or Google Sheets for contract tracking and reporting.

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 San Jose and Taipei, 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.