Internal Acceleration, Research Engineer (Hardware)

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

Job Summary

Our Internal Acceleration team’s mandate is to build agents to accelerate the production of frontier tokens.

You’ll work directly with our founders and embed with our hardware team to build new agentic harnesses and operating systems to transform the way hardware is built in an AI native world. You’ll work on harnesses, tool use, context, and memory, execution environments, and evals that let agents conduct long-running engineering work that is useful.

This role is for engineers who thrive on ambiguity, have real product sense, and want to own problems end to end. It’s a whiteboard for future founders. The problems we solve are time-sensitive and business-critical. This role will not be a 9-5, and the ideal candidate is excited about that.

You may be a good fit if you

• Have at least 1-5+ years of experience building and shipping software end to end, ideally at a fast-moving startup

• Have built agents for complex, multi-step tasks that people depend on, beyond calling an API: tool design, long-context management, evals, and failure analysis.

• Are a strong software engineer who has built reliable systems others depend on, such as distributed systems, experiment infrastructure, or developer tooling.

• Use coding agents heavily, read their transcripts closely, and change the system when an agent is confidently wrong.

• Have high agency in unfamiliar domains. You find the real problem and drive it forward.

• Have product sense, design taste, and extreme attention to detail

Key Responsibilities

• Embed with our hardware 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.

Strong candidates may also have

• Exposure to chip development, kernels, hardware, or manufacturing.

• Infrastructure, data engineering, or DevOps experience

• Fine-tuning, RAG over proprietary technical data, or multi-agent orchestration

• Startup experience, especially through hypergrowth

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage

  • $500 per month credit for waiving medical benefits

• Housing subsidy of $2,500 per month for those living within walking distance of the office

• Relocation support for those moving to San Jose (Santana Row)

• Various wellness benefits covering fitness, mental health, and more

• Daily lunch and dinner in our office

• Unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification

Base Compensation Range

• $150K – $400K+

• Plus Significant Equity

How we’re different

Etched believes in the Bitter Lesson. We are the first inference-focused frontier AI system, betting early on transformer and transformer-like architectures and on increasing model sizes. Our addressable market is the entirety of inference, unlike many of our competitors.

We are a fully in-person team in San Jose (Santana Row), 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 and work across disciplines as needed.

About Etched

Etched is building hardware for frontier intelligence. We co-design chips, racks, software, and manufacturing to deliver best-in‑class throughput and latency across both prefill and decode workloads. Backed by hundreds of millions from top‑tier investors and staffed by leading engineers, Etched is redefining the infrastructure layer for the fastest growing industry in history.