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Salary: USD 150,000 - 400,000 / annual
Etched is building hardware for frontier AI inference. 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.
You will work directly with founders and embed with the hardware engineering team to design and deploy LLM agents integrated into engineering workflows via tool-calling and Model Context Protocol (MCP). Your responsibilities include:
- Embed with the hardware team to identify high-leverage bottlenecks and own solutions end-to-end, from conception to production tools that engineers rely on daily.
- Build and deploy LLM agents wired into engineering workflows with tool-calling and MCP capabilities.
- Create 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: interfaces, data pipelines, and infrastructure that define how Etched builds.
- Design evals and track adoption to identify high-impact tools and eliminate low-value ones.
- Take on special projects directly with founders, surfacing cross-company problems and driving critical milestones.
This is a high-ownership role for engineers who thrive on ambiguity, have strong product sense, and want to own problems end-to-end. The role is not a traditional 9-to-5; the ideal candidate is excited about the intensity and pace required to move fast on time-sensitive, business-critical problems.
Etched is a fully in-person team in San Jose (Santana Row) with no boundaries between engineering and research. All technical staff contribute to both and work across disciplines as needed. The company is backed by hundreds of millions from top-tier investors and staffed by leading engineers.
REQUIREMENTS:
- At least 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 that people depend on, including tool design, long-context management, evals, and failure analysis (beyond simple API calls).
- Strong software engineering foundation with experience building reliable systems others depend on, such as distributed systems, experiment infrastructure, or developer tooling.
- Heavy user of coding agents; you read transcripts closely and iterate on the system when agents are confidently wrong.
- High agency in unfamiliar domains; you identify the real problem and drive it 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.
