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Salary: USD 150,000 - 400,000 / annual
Etched is hiring a Research Engineer for its Internal Acceleration team to build AI agents that accelerate the production of frontier tokens. You'll work directly with founders and embed with the production team to create agentic harnesses, operating systems, and infrastructure that transform how hardware is built in an AI-native world.
Key responsibilities include:
- Embedding with the production team to identify high-leverage bottlenecks and own solutions end-to-end
- Building and deploying LLM agents integrated into engineering workflows via tool-calling and MCP
- Creating execution environments where agents can verify their own work with sandboxed access to simulators, EDA flows, compilers, profilers, and real hardware
- Shipping full-stack internal products from zero to one: interfaces, data pipelines, and infrastructure that define how Etched builds
- Designing evals and tracking adoption to measure impact and iterate on tools
- Taking on special projects directly with founders to surface problems and hit critical milestones
You'll work on harnesses, tool use, context and memory, execution environments, and evals that enable agents to conduct long-running engineering work. This is a role for engineers who thrive on ambiguity, have strong product sense, and want to own problems end-to-end. The role is not a 9-5; the ideal candidate is excited about high intensity and impact.
Etched is building hardware for frontier intelligence, co-designing chips, racks, software, and manufacturing to deliver best-in-class throughput and latency for inference workloads. The company is fully in-person in San Jose (Santana Row) and values engineering skills highly, with no boundaries between engineering and research.
Benefits include medical, dental, and vision coverage with generous premiums ($500/month credit for waiving), $2,500/month housing subsidy for those within walking distance of the office, relocation support, wellness benefits, daily lunch and dinner, and unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification.
REQUIREMENTS:
- At least 1–5+ years of experience building and shipping software end-to-end, ideally at a fast-moving startup
- Experience building agents for complex, multi-step tasks beyond API calls: tool design, long-context management, evals, and failure analysis
- Strong software engineering background with experience building reliable systems others depend on (distributed systems, experiment infrastructure, developer tooling)
- Heavy use of coding agents with close attention to transcripts and ability to iterate when agents are confidently wrong
- High agency in unfamiliar domains; ability to find 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
