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Internal Acceleration, Research Engineer (Kernels)

Etched· Software
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San Jose$150k - $400k + equityFull-timePosted 4d ago

About the role

Role focused on building agents to accelerate production of frontier tokens by embedding with the kernels team to create agentic harnesses and operating systems for AI-native hardware development.

Responsibilities

  • Embed with our kernels team to find the highest-leverage bottlenecks, and own each one from first idea to a tool engineers rely on every day.
  • Build and deploy LLM agents wired into our engineering workflows via tool-calling and MCP.
  • Build 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: the interfaces, data pipelines, and infrastructure that define how Etched builds.
  • Measure what works. Design evals and track adoption so we double down on the tools that matter and kill the ones that don’t.
  • Take on special projects directly with the founders, surfacing problems across the company and doing whatever it takes to hit critical milestones.

Qualifications

  • Have at least 1-5+ years of experience building and shipping software end to end, ideally at a fast-moving startup
  • Have built agents for complex, multi-step tasks that people depend on, beyond calling an API: tool design, long-context management, evals, and failure analysis.
  • Are a strong software engineer who has built reliable systems others depend on, such as distributed systems, experiment infrastructure, or developer tooling.
  • Use coding agents heavily, read their transcripts closely, and change the system when an agent is confidently wrong.
  • Have high agency in unfamiliar domains. You find the real problem and drive it forward.
  • Have product sense, design taste, and extreme attention to detail

Skills

Required:Software engineeringAgent design and tool-callingOperation of ML/LLM agentsSystem design

Benefits

  • Medical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage
  • $500 per month credit for waiving medical benefits
  • Housing subsidy of $2,500 per month for those living within walking distance of the office
  • Relocation support for those moving to San Jose (Santana Row)
  • Various wellness benefits covering fitness, mental health, and more
  • Daily lunch and dinner in our office
  • Unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification
Last updated Oct 22, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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About Etched

Etched is building frontier inference clusters: co-designs chips, racks, software and manufacturing to push the pareto frontier for AI hardware.

frontier inference clustersAI hardwarechipsrackssoftwaremanufacturingparto frontier
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