Internal Acceleration, Research Engineer

Etched • San Jose, CA

1d • $150,000 - $400,000 • Onsite

About The Position

Etched’s Internal Acceleration team builds agents to accelerate the production of frontier tokens. The Research Engineer works directly with the founders and embeds with teams building kernels, ASICs, hardware, production, and special projects. The role develops agentic harnesses and operating systems to transform how hardware is built in an AI-native environment, including work on harnesses, tool use, context and memory, execution environments, and evaluations that enable agents to conduct useful, long-running engineering work.

This role is suited to engineers who thrive in ambiguity, have product sense, and want to own problems end to end. The work is time-sensitive and business-critical, and the posting says the role will not be a 9-to-5. Etched is a fully in-person team in San Jose (Santana Row). Its technical staff contribute to both engineering and research and work across disciplines as needed.

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 that people depend on, including tool design, long-context management, evaluations, and failure analysis—not only API calling.
• Strong software engineering skills and experience building reliable systems others depend on, such as distributed systems, experiment infrastructure, or developer tooling.
• Heavy use of coding agents, close review of their transcripts, and ability to change the system when an agent is confidently wrong.
• High agency in unfamiliar domains, including finding the real problem and driving it forward.
• Product sense, design taste, and extreme attention to detail.

Nice To Haves

• Exposure to chip development, kernels, hardware, or manufacturing.
• Infrastructure, data engineering, or DevOps experience.
• Experience with fine-tuning, RAG over proprietary technical data, or multi-agent orchestration.
• Startup experience, especially through hypergrowth.

Responsibilities

• Embed with kernels, ASIC, hardware, and production teams to find high-leverage bottlenecks and own solutions from initial idea through tools engineers rely on daily.
• Build and deploy LLM agents integrated into engineering workflows through tool-calling and MCP.
• Build execution environments that let agents verify their work, with sandboxed access to simulators, EDA flows, compilers, profilers, and real hardware.
• Ship full-stack internal products from zero to one, including interfaces, data pipelines, and infrastructure.
• Design evaluations and track adoption to measure which tools work and prioritize or discontinue them accordingly.
• Take on special projects directly with the founders, identify problems across the company, and do what is needed to meet critical milestones.

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).
• Wellness benefits covering fitness, mental health, and more.
• Daily lunch and dinner in the office.
• Unlimited compute budget, subject to ROI justification.
• Significant equity.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Entry Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed