Internal Acceleration, Research Engineer (Kernels)
Etched · San Jose
About this role
## Internal Acceleration, Research Engineer (Kernels) ### Job Summary Our Internal Acceleration team builds agents to accelerate the production of frontier tokens. You’ll work directly with our founders and embed with our kernels team to create new agentic harnesses and operating systems that transform how hardware is built in an AI-native world. You’ll focus on harnesses, tool use, context and memory, execution environments, and evals that enable agents to perform long-running engineering work that’s useful. This role is for engineers who thrive on ambiguity, have strong product sense, and want to own problems end to end. ### You May Be a Good Fit If You - Have **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** people depend on (beyond calling an API), including tool design, long-context management, evals, and failure analysis - Are a strong software engineer who has built **reliable systems** others depend on (e.g., distributed systems, experiment infrastructure, developer tooling) - Use coding agents heavily, review their transcripts closely, and improve the system when an agent is confidently wrong - Have high agency in unfamiliar domains—identify the real problem and drive it forward - Have product sense, design taste, and extreme attention to detail ### Key Responsibilities - Embed with the kernels team to identify the highest-leverage bottlenecks and own them from first idea to tools engineers rely on daily - Build and deploy **LLM agents** integrated into engineering workflows via **tool-calling and MCP** - Build **execution environments** where agents can verify their own work using 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 defining how Etched builds) - Design and run **evals**, track adoption, and double down on what works while killing what doesn’t - Take on special projects directly with founders to surface cross-company problems and hit critical milestones ### Strong Candidates May Also Have - 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 ### Benefits - Medical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage - **$500/month credit** for waiving medical benefits - **$2,500/month housing subsidy** for those living within walking distance of the office - Relocation support for moving to **San Jose (Santana Row)** - Wellness benefits (fitness, mental health, and more) - Daily lunch and dinner in the office - Unlimited compute budget (subject to ROI justification) ### Base Compensation Range - **$150K – $400K+** - Plus **significant equity** ### How We’re Different Etched believes in the **Bitter Lesson**—we’re an inference-focused frontier AI system betting early on transformer and transformer-like architectures and increasing model sizes. We’re a fully in-person team in **San Jose (Santana Row)**, with no boundaries between engineering and research. ### About Etched Etched is building hardware for frontier intelligence. We co-design chips, racks, software, and manufacturing to deliver best-in-class throughput and latency across both prefill and decod
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