Production AI Systems Research Engineer

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

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental and vision coverage

Waiver credit

Housing subsidy

Relocation support

Wellness benefits

Daily lunch and dinner

Unlimited compute budget

Job summary

Etched is building hardware for frontier intelligence in San Jose. We seek engineers who thrive in ambiguity, own problems end to end, and ship practical internal tools that accelerate token production.

You will work closely with founders and the production team on harnesses, memory, tool use, and execution environments for long-running engineering tasks. The role rewards initiative, product sense, and a hands-on approach to complex systems, including setting up evals and incremental

Qualifications

• 1–5+ years of experience building and shipping software end to end.
• Built agents for complex, multi-step tasks beyond API calls, including tool design and long-context management.
• Strong software engineer with reliable systems such as distributed systems, experiment infrastructure, or developer tooling.
• Use coding agents heavily, read transcripts, and adjust the system when an agent is confidently wrong.
• High agency in unfamiliar domains and drive to solve real problems.
• Product sense, design taste, and extreme attention to detail.

Responsibilities

• Embed with our production team to identify highest-leverage bottlenecks and own them from idea to tool used daily.
• Build and deploy LLM agents wired into engineering workflows via tool-calling and MCP.
• Create execution environments with sandboxed simulators, EDA flows, compilers, profilers, and hardware access.
• Ship full-stack internal products defining interfaces, data pipelines, and infrastructure.
• Design evals, measure adoption, and double down on impactful tools.
• Tackle special projects with founders to hit critical milestones and surface cross-company issues.

Skills

End-to-end software

Agent development

Distributed systems

Experiment infrastructure

Developer tooling

Agent coding

Job description

Etched is building hardware for frontier intelligence in San Jose. We seek engineers who thrive in ambiguity, own problems end to end, and ship practical internal tools that accelerate token production.

You will work closely with founders and the production team on harnesses, memory, tool use, and execution environments for long-running engineering tasks. The role rewards initiative, product sense, and a hands-on approach to complex systems, including setting up evals and incremental