Acceleration Engineer (ASIC) for AI Workflows

Etched; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 400,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision packages

Housing subsidy

Relocation support

Wellness benefits

Daily lunch and dinner

Unlimited compute budget

Job summary

Etched is building hardware for frontier intelligence and seeking engineers to join our Internal Acceleration team in San Jose. You will embed with the ASIC team to build agentic harnesses and operating systems that transform how hardware is built for AI-native workloads.

You’ll own end-to-end work from ideation to delivery, focusing on tool-calling, multi-agent orchestration, and execution environments. This role thrives on ambiguity, requires strong software engineering, and offers significant

Qualifications

• Have at least 1-5+ years of experience building and shipping software end to end, ideally at a fast-moving startup.
• Built agents for complex, multi-step tasks that people depend on beyond APIs: tool design, long-context management, evals, and failure analysis.
• Strong software engineer who has built reliable systems others depend on, such as distributed systems, experiment infrastructure, or developer tooling.

Responsibilities

• Embed with our ASIC team to find the highest-leverage bottlenecks, and own each one from first idea to a tool engineers rely on every day.
• Build and deploy LLM agents wired into our engineering workflows via tool-calling and MCP.
• Build execution environments where agents can verify their own work, with sandboxed access to simulators, EDA flows, compilers, profilers, and real hardware.
• Ship full-stack internal products from zero to one: the interfaces, data pipelines, and infrastructure that define how Etched builds.
• Measure what works. Design evals and track adoption so we double down on the tools that matter and kill the ones that don’t.
• Take on special projects directly with the founders, surfacing problems across the company and doing whatever it takes to hit critical milestones.

Skills

Software development

Agent development

Tool design

Distributed systems

Coding agents

Startup experience

Tools

MCP

Job description

Etched is building hardware for frontier intelligence and seeking engineers to join our Internal Acceleration team in San Jose. You will embed with the ASIC team to build agentic harnesses and operating systems that transform how hardware is built for AI-native workloads.

You’ll own end-to-end work from ideation to delivery, focusing on tool-calling, multi-agent orchestration, and execution environments. This role thrives on ambiguity, requires strong software engineering, and offers significant