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Salary: USD 150,000 - 400,000 / annual
Etched is building hardware for frontier AI inference, co-designing chips, racks, software, and manufacturing. The Internal Acceleration team's mandate is to build AI agents that accelerate the production of frontier tokens and transform how hardware is built in an AI-native world.
In this role, you'll work directly with founders and embed with the ASIC team to build agentic harnesses, operating systems, tool-use frameworks, context and memory management, execution environments, and evaluation systems that enable agents to conduct long-running engineering work. You'll own problems end-to-end, from identifying bottlenecks to shipping full-stack internal products that the engineering team depends on daily.
Key responsibilities include:
- Embedding with the ASIC team to identify high-leverage bottlenecks and owning solutions from conception to deployment
- Building and deploying LLM agents integrated into engineering workflows via tool-calling and MCP (Model Context Protocol)
- Creating execution environments where agents can verify their own work with sandboxed access to simulators, EDA flows, compilers, profilers, and hardware
- Shipping full-stack internal products: interfaces, data pipelines, and infrastructure that define how Etched builds
- Designing evals and tracking adoption to identify which tools drive impact
- Taking on special projects directly with founders to surface cross-company problems and hit critical milestones
This is a high-ambiguity role for engineers with strong product sense who thrive on ownership and are excited about a demanding pace. The company is fully in-person in San Jose (Santana Row) and values engineering excellence across both research and engineering disciplines.
Benefits include medical/dental/vision with generous coverage, $2,500/month housing subsidy for those within walking distance of the office, relocation support, wellness benefits, daily meals, and unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 1–5+ years of experience building and shipping software end-to-end, ideally at a fast-moving startup
- Demonstrated experience building agents for complex, multi-step tasks beyond simple API calls, including tool design, long-context management, evals, and failure analysis
- Strong software engineering foundation with experience building reliable systems others depend on (distributed systems, experiment infrastructure, developer tooling)
- Heavy use of coding agents with close attention to transcripts; ability to identify and fix confident errors in agent behavior
- High agency in unfamiliar domains; ability to identify root problems and drive them forward
- Product sense, design taste, and extreme attention to detail
STRONG ADDITIONAL QUALIFICATIONS:
- 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
