IA Research Engineer (Kernels) Intern
About The Position
Etched is seeking Spring ’27 and Summer ’27 IA Research Engineer (Kernels) interns to build agents that accelerate how the company produces frontier tokens. Interns will embed with the kernels team and work alongside the founders on agentic harnesses, tools, and evaluations that enable agents to perform long-running engineering work. The role suits builders comfortable with ambiguity, product-minded problem solving, and end-to-end ownership. The internship is 12 weeks and based in Etched’s fully in-person San Jose, California office. Interns receive direct mentorship from industry leaders and world-class engineers, and may work across engineering and research disciplines.
Requirements
- Progress toward a Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD degree in computer science, computer engineering, or a related field.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals and a record of shipping projects that other people use.
- Experience building agents for multi-step tasks beyond calling an API, including tool design, context management, evaluations, and failure analysis.
- Heavy use of coding agents, including reviewing their transcripts and changing the system when an agent is confidently wrong.
- High agency in unfamiliar domains, product sense, and extreme attention to detail.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with chip development, GPU kernels, hardware, or manufacturing.
- Experience with infrastructure, data engineering, or DevOps.
- Experience with fine-tuning, RAG over technical data, or multi-agent orchestration.
- Hackathons, startups, or side projects with real users.
Responsibilities
- Embed with the kernels team to identify high-leverage bottlenecks and turn them into tools engineers use every day.
- Build and deploy LLM agents integrated into engineering workflows through tool-calling and MCP.
- Help create execution environments where agents can verify their work, with sandboxed access to simulators, compilers, profilers, and real hardware.
- Ship internal products end to end, including interfaces, data pipelines, and supporting infrastructure.
- Design evaluations and track adoption to determine which tools are effective.
- Support special projects with the founders across the company.
Benefits
- Paid 12-week internship.
- Generous housing support for interns relocating.
- Daily lunch and dinner in the office.
- Direct mentorship from industry leaders and world-class engineers.
- Opportunity to work on an important problem.
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What This Job Offers
Career Level
Intern
Education Level
No Education Listed
