Research Engineer: AI Kernels & Agent Systems

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

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision

Housing subsidy $2,500/mo

Relocation support

Daily lunch and dinner

Unlimited compute budget

Job summary

Etched is building hardware for frontier intelligence and developing agent-driven systems in San Jose. We embed engineers with founders and our kernels team to craft new harnesses, operating systems, and toolchains for AI-native hardware.

You will own problems end to end, design agentic workflows, and contribute across engineering and research in a fast-moving, in-person startup environment.

Qualifications

• 1–5+ years building and shipping software end to end at startups
• Experience building agents for multi-step tasks beyond API calls
• Strong software engineering with reliable distributed systems or tooling

Responsibilities

• Embed with kernels team to identify bottlenecks and own them end to end
• Build and deploy LLM agents integrated into engineering workflows via tool-calling and MCP
• Create sandboxed execution environments with simulators, EDA flows, compilers, profilers
• Ship full-stack internal products including interfaces and data pipelines
• Design evals and measure adoption to double down on effective tools
• Tackle special projects with founders to hit milestones

Skills

End-to-end software delivery

Distributed systems

Tool design & integration

LLM agent tooling

DevOps / infra

Tools

Simulators

EDA Flows

Compilers

Profilers

Real hardware

Job description

Etched is building hardware for frontier intelligence and developing agent-driven systems in San Jose. We embed engineers with founders and our kernels team to craft new harnesses, operating systems, and toolchains for AI-native hardware.

You will own problems end to end, design agentic workflows, and contribute across engineering and research in a fast-moving, in-person startup environment.