AI Hardware Acceleration Research Engineer

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 in our office

Unlimited compute budget

Job summary

Etched seeks engineers for our Internal Acceleration team to build agents that accelerate frontier token production. You’ll work with the founders and hardware team to craft agentic harnesses and OSs that transform how hardware is built in an AI-native world.

You will own problems end to end, from ideas to tool design, context, memory, and evaluation, with time-sensitive, business-critical challenges that require passion and initiative beyond a 9-5 schedule.

Qualifications

• 1–5+ years building and shipping software end to end.
• Built agents for complex, multi-step tasks beyond API calls: tool design, long-context management, evals, failure analysis.
• Strong software engineer with reliable systems: distributed systems, experiment infrastructure, or developer tooling.

Responsibilities

• Embed with our hardware team to identify bottlenecks and own each one from idea to a tool engineers rely on.
• Build and deploy LLM agents wired into engineering workflows via tool-calling and MCP.
• Create execution environments where agents can verify their work with sandboxed access to simulators, EDA flows, compilers, profilers, and real hardware.
• Ship full-stack internal products from zero to one: interfaces, data pipelines, and infrastructure.
• Measure what works; design evals and track adoption to double down on impactful tools.
• Tackle special projects with the founders, surfacing problems across the company and meeting milestones.

Skills

Software engineering

End-to-end delivery

Distributed systems

Tool design

Long context management

Evals

DevOps experience

Hardware exposure

Startup experience

Tools

LLM tooling

Sandbox environments

Job description

Etched seeks engineers for our Internal Acceleration team to build agents that accelerate frontier token production. You’ll work with the founders and hardware team to craft agentic harnesses and OSs that transform how hardware is built in an AI-native world.

You will own problems end to end, from ideas to tool design, context, memory, and evaluation, with time-sensitive, business-critical challenges that require passion and initiative beyond a 9-5 schedule.