AI Research Engineer Intern — Frontier Hardware & Tools

Etched.ai; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 33,000 - 60,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Lunch & dinner provided

Mentorship from industry leaders

Job summary

Etched is seeking a Spring ’27 and Summer ’27 IA Research Engineer intern to build agents that speed up frontier token production. You’ll embed with the kernels team, work with founders on agentic harnesses, tools, and evals, and own problems end to end in a hands-on, high-ambiguity environment.

This 12-week paid internship offers mentorship from industry leaders and exposure to hardware, software, and tooling across the company.

Qualifications

• Pursuing a Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD degree in CS/CE or related field.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and a track record of shipping projects.
• Experience building agents for multi-step tasks beyond API calls.
• Experience reading agent transcripts and updating system when an agent errs.
• High agency in unfamiliar domains with product sense and attention to detail.

Responsibilities

• Embed with kernels team to find bottlenecks and build tools.
• Build and deploy LLM agents wired into workflows via tool-calling and MCP.
• Create execution environments with sandboxed hardware access.
• Ship internal products end to end with interfaces and data pipelines.
• Design evals and track adoption.
• Support special projects with the founders.

Skills

Software engineering

Shipping projects

Agent design

Multi-agent tooling

Context management

Education

CS/CE degree

Tools

LLM tooling

Job description

Etched is seeking a Spring ’27 and Summer ’27 IA Research Engineer intern to build agents that speed up frontier token production. You’ll embed with the kernels team, work with founders on agentic harnesses, tools, and evals, and own problems end to end in a hands-on, high-ambiguity environment.

This 12-week paid internship offers mentorship from industry leaders and exposure to hardware, software, and tooling across the company.