Internal Acceleration, Research Engineer (Hardware)
Etched · San Jose
About this role
### Internal Acceleration, Research Engineer (Hardware) **About the role** Our Internal Acceleration team builds agents to accelerate the production of frontier tokens. You’ll work directly with our founders and embed with our hardware 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 & memory, execution environments, and evals—enabling agents to perform long-running engineering work that’s useful and reliable. This is a high-agency role for engineers who thrive in ambiguity, have strong product sense, and want to own problems end to end. **Not a 9–5.** --- ### You may be a good fit if you - Have **1–5+ years** 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, **read transcripts closely**, and **change the system** when an agent is confidently wrong - Have high agency in unfamiliar domains—find the real problem and drive it forward - Have product sense, design taste, and extreme attention to detail --- ### Key responsibilities - Embed with the hardware 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** - Create **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 that define how Etched builds - Measure what works: design **evals**, track adoption, and double down on what matters - Take on special projects directly with the 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 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 --- ### Compensation - **Base:** $150K – $400K+ - **Plus significant equity** --- ### About Etched Etched believes in the **Bitter Lesson**. We’re an inference-focused frontier AI system, betting early on transformer and transformer-like architectures and on increasing model sizes. We’re a **fully in-person** team in **San Jose (Santana Row)**. We don’t separate engineering and research—our technical staff contribute across disciplines as needed. Etched is building hardware for frontier intelligence: we co-design chips, racks, software,
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