Etched

<h3>Job Summary</h3>Etched is building AI systems that accelerate its own development. As a Research Engineer on the RL Frontiers team, you will train our proprietary frontier models to automate kernel development, ASIC engineering, production pipelines, and 3-D hardware operating systems.You will use our proprietary simulators and environments to create custom data mixes and post-train models to SOTA performance on our hardest engineering tasks.<h3>Key Responsibilities</h3><ul><li>Own the post-training stack completely end to end.</li><li>Build RL environments with ASIC, kernel, and supercomputing engineers, rewarded by simulation, formal tools, tests, and hardware measurements.</li><li>Create custom data mixes that unlock frontier performance on relevant tasks.</li><li>Create benchmarks that drive real productivity in the models and avoid reward hacking</li></ul><h3>You may be a good fit if you</h3><ul><li>Have hands-on post-training experience, including SFT and RL (e.g., PPO, GRPO), and have shipped models people used.</li><li>Have taken a model from bad to good on a task it wasn’t built for, ideally with scarce data, for example as an early post-training hire at an applied AI company.</li><li>Are a strong PyTorch and distributed-training engineer who reads the rollouts and checks the numbers before trusting a result.</li><li>Understand the systems side of RL well enough to make the loop faster and cheaper, not just better.</li><li>Are entrepreneurial and make good calls under compute and data constraints. Former founders are a plus.</li></ul><h3>Strong candidates may also have experience with</h3><ul><li>RL or post-training frameworks (e.g., verl, OpenRLHF, TRL, prime-rl) or inference engines (vLLM, SGLang).</li><li>Agentic, multi-turn RL with verifiable rewards.</li><li>Distillation and training small, specialized models for production.</li><li>ASIC design or verification, accelerator kernels, or large-scale compute infrastructure.</li></ul><h3>Benefits</h3><ul><li>Medical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage<ul><li>$500 per month credit for waiving medical benefits</li></ul></li><li>Housing subsidy of $2,500 per month for those living within walking distance of the office</li><li>Relocation support for those moving to San Jose (Santana Row)</li><li>Various wellness benefits covering fitness, mental health, and more</li><li>Daily lunch and dinner in our office</li><li>Unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification</li></ul><h3>Base Compensation Range</h3><ul><li>$400K+</li><li>Plus Significant Equity</li></ul><h3>How we’re different</h3>Etched believes in the Bitter Lesson. We are the first inference-focused frontier AI system, betting early on transformer and transformer-like architectures and on increasing model sizes. Our addressable market is the entirety of inference, unlike many of our competitors.We are a fully in-person team in San Jose (Santana Row), and greatly value engineering skills. We do not have boundaries between engineering and research, and we expect all of our technical staff to contribute to both and work across disciplines as needed.<h3>About Etched</h3>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 decode workloads. Our first products are heavily focused on inference. Backed by hundreds of millions from top-tier investors and staffed by leading engineers, Etched is redefining the infrastructure layer for the fastest growing industry in history.

Research Engineer, RL Frontiers

About EtchedEtched 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 decode workloads. Our first products are heavily focused on inference. Backed by hundreds of millions from top-tier investors and staffed by leading engineers, Etched is redefining the infrastructure layer for the fastest growing industry in history.Job SummaryWe are seeking highly motivated and detail-oriented software engineers to join our chip simulation team. We’re building custom AI inference chips that leverage tight hardware-software co-design to deliver world-best performance. The chip simulation team plays a key role in hardware-software co-design, enabling early development of the full software stack. As an engineer on this team, you will design, develop, and test simulations of our custom hardware. You will be working at the cutting edge of hardware innovation.Key responsibilities<ul><li>Design, develop, and maintain simulations of our hardware. Ensuring high levels of accuracy, efficient debugging, and optimal performance.</li><li>Influence architectural decisions through review and co-design</li><li>Create and maintain test plans, work with hardware teams to validate their documentation.</li><li>Build tools to debug simulations, and enable developers to debug software running on the simulator.</li></ul>You may be a good fit if you have<ul><li>Proficiency in C/C++</li><li>Strong understanding of low-level software engineering.</li><li>Strong understanding of hardware engineering.</li><li>Excellent communication and collaboration skills.</li></ul>Strong candidates may also have experience with (Nice-to-have qualifications)<ul><li>Experience developing hardware or system simulations (e.g., SystemC, gem5, QEMU, or custom frameworks).</li><li>Experience with custom ML hardware accelerators (e.g., Google TPU)</li><li>Experience with firmware, kernel and driver development (e.g., Linux, FreeRTOS)</li><li>Experience with hardware development and verification.</li><li>Experience with multiprocessing and multithreading.</li><li>Familiarity with bit-accurate numerics modeling.</li><li>Experience with performance profiling and optimization of simulation code</li><li>Proficiency with Python for test harness development, bazel, and git.</li></ul>Representative projects<ul><li>Implement a simulation of our on-chip modules.</li><li>Integrate simulated chips with simulated hosts (QEMU), enabling Kernel driver development and host software testing.</li><li>Integrate multiple simulated chips to validate multi-chip software scale-out and scale-up approaches.</li><li>Work closely with our software teams in debugging early software deliverables.</li></ul>Benefits<ul><li>Medical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage<ul><li>$500 per month credit for waiving medical benefits</li></ul></li><li>Housing subsidy of $2k per month for those living within walking distance of the office</li><li>Relocation support for those moving to San Jose (Santana Row)</li><li>Various wellness benefits covering fitness, mental health, and more</li><li>Daily lunch + dinner in our office</li><li>Unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification</li></ul>How we’re differentEtched believes in the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer ugc" href="http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html">Bitter Lesson</a>. We are the first inference-focused frontier AI system. Our addressable market is the entirety of inference, unlike many of our competitors.<div> </div>We are a fully in-person team in San Jose (Santana Row), and greatly value engineering skills. We do not have boundaries between engineering and research, and we expect all of our technical staff to contribute to both and work across disciplines as needed.

Chip Simulation Software Engineer

<h3>Job Summary</h3>Our Internal Acceleration team’s mandate is to build agents to accelerate the production of frontier tokens.You’ll work directly with our founders and embed with our production team to build new agentic harnesses and operating systems to transform the way hardware is built in an AI native world. You’ll work on harnesses, tool use, context, and memory, execution environments, and evals that let agents conduct long-running engineering work that is useful.This role is for engineers who thrive on ambiguity, have real product sense, and want to own problems end to end. It’s a whiteboard for future founders. The problems we solve are time-sensitive and business-critical. This role will not be a 9-5, and the ideal candidate is excited about that.<h3>You may be a good fit if you</h3><ul><li>Have at least 1-5+ years of experience building and shipping software end to end, ideally at a fast-moving startup</li><li>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.</li><li>Are a strong software engineer who has built reliable systems others depend on, such as distributed systems, experiment infrastructure, or developer tooling.</li><li>Use coding agents heavily, read their transcripts closely, and change the system when an agent is confidently wrong.</li><li>Have high agency in unfamiliar domains. You find the real problem and drive it forward.</li><li>Have product sense, design taste, and extreme attention to detail</li></ul><h3>Key Responsibilities</h3><ul><li>Embed with our production team to find the highest-leverage bottlenecks, and own each one from first idea to a tool engineers rely on every day.</li><li>Build and deploy LLM agents wired into our engineering workflows via tool-calling and MCP.</li><li>Build execution environments where agents can verify their own work, with sandboxed access to simulators, EDA flows, compilers, profilers, and real hardware.</li><li>Ship full-stack internal products from zero to one: the interfaces, data pipelines, and infrastructure that define how Etched builds.</li><li>Measure what works. Design evals and track adoption so we double down on the tools that matter and kill the ones that don’t.</li><li>Take on special projects directly with the founders, surfacing problems across the company and doing whatever it takes to hit critical milestones.</li></ul><h3>Strong candidates may also have</h3><ul><li>Exposure to chip development, kernels, hardware, or manufacturing.</li><li>Infrastructure, data engineering, or DevOps experience</li><li>Fine-tuning, RAG over proprietary technical data, or multi-agent orchestration</li><li>Startup experience, especially through hypergrowth</li></ul><h3>Benefits</h3><ul><li>Medical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage<ul><li>$500 per month credit for waiving medical benefits</li></ul></li><li>Housing subsidy of $2,500 per month for those living within walking distance of the office</li><li>Relocation support for those moving to San Jose (Santana Row)</li><li>Various wellness benefits covering fitness, mental health, and more</li><li>Daily lunch and dinner in our office</li><li>Unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification</li></ul><h3>Base Compensation Range</h3><ul><li>$150K – $400K+</li><li>Plus Significant Equity</li></ul><h3>How we’re different</h3>Etched believes in the Bitter Lesson. We are the first inference-focused frontier AI system, betting early on transformer and transformer-like architectures and on increasing model sizes. Our addressable market is the entirety of inference, unlike many of our competitors.We are a fully in-person team in San Jose (Santana Row), and greatly value engineering skills. We do not have boundaries between engineering and research, and we expect all of our technical staff to contribute to both and work across disciplines as needed.<h3>About Etched</h3>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 decode workloads. Our first products are heavily focused on inference. Backed by hundreds of millions from top-tier investors and staffed by leading engineers, Etched is redefining the infrastructure layer for the fastest growing industry in history.

Internal Acceleration, Research Engineer (Production)

<h3>Job Summary</h3>Our Internal Acceleration team’s mandate is to build agents to accelerate the production of frontier tokens.You’ll work directly with our founders and embed with our hardware team to build new agentic harnesses and operating systems to transform the way hardware is built in an AI native world. You’ll work on harnesses, tool use, context, and memory, execution environments, and evals that let agents conduct long-running engineering work that is useful.This role is for engineers who thrive on ambiguity, have real product sense, and want to own problems end to end. It’s a whiteboard for future founders. The problems we solve are time-sensitive and business-critical. This role will not be a 9-5, and the ideal candidate is excited about that.<h3>You may be a good fit if you</h3><ul><li>Have at least 1-5+ years of experience building and shipping software end to end, ideally at a fast-moving startup</li><li>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.</li><li>Are a strong software engineer who has built reliable systems others depend on, such as distributed systems, experiment infrastructure, or developer tooling.</li><li>Use coding agents heavily, read their transcripts closely, and change the system when an agent is confidently wrong.</li><li>Have high agency in unfamiliar domains. You find the real problem and drive it forward.</li><li>Have product sense, design taste, and extreme attention to detail</li></ul><h3>Key Responsibilities</h3><ul><li>Embed with our hardware team to find the highest-leverage bottlenecks, and own each one from first idea to a tool engineers rely on every day.</li><li>Build and deploy LLM agents wired into our engineering workflows via tool-calling and MCP.</li><li>Build execution environments where agents can verify their own work, with sandboxed access to simulators, EDA flows, compilers, profilers, and real hardware.</li><li>Ship full-stack internal products from zero to one: the interfaces, data pipelines, and infrastructure that define how Etched builds.</li><li>Measure what works. Design evals and track adoption so we double down on the tools that matter and kill the ones that don’t.</li><li>Take on special projects directly with the founders, surfacing problems across the company and doing whatever it takes to hit critical milestones.</li></ul><h3>Strong candidates may also have</h3><ul><li>Exposure to chip development, kernels, hardware, or manufacturing.</li><li>Infrastructure, data engineering, or DevOps experience</li><li>Fine-tuning, RAG over proprietary technical data, or multi-agent orchestration</li><li>Startup experience, especially through hypergrowth</li></ul><h3>Benefits</h3><ul><li>Medical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage<ul><li>$500 per month credit for waiving medical benefits</li></ul></li><li>Housing subsidy of $2,500 per month for those living within walking distance of the office</li><li>Relocation support for those moving to San Jose (Santana Row)</li><li>Various wellness benefits covering fitness, mental health, and more</li><li>Daily lunch and dinner in our office</li><li>Unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification</li></ul><h3>Base Compensation Range</h3><ul><li>$150K – $400K+</li><li>Plus Significant Equity</li></ul><h3>How we’re different</h3>Etched believes in the Bitter Lesson. We are the first inference-focused frontier AI system, betting early on transformer and transformer-like architectures and on increasing model sizes. Our addressable market is the entirety of inference, unlike many of our competitors.We are a fully in-person team in San Jose (Santana Row), and greatly value engineering skills. We do not have boundaries between engineering and research, and we expect all of our technical staff to contribute to both and work across disciplines as needed.<h3>About Etched</h3>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 decode workloads. Our first products are heavily focused on inference. Backed by hundreds of millions from top-tier investors and staffed by leading engineers, Etched is redefining the infrastructure layer for the fastest growing industry in history.

Internal Acceleration, Research Engineer (Hardware)

<h3>Job Summary</h3>Our Internal Acceleration team’s mandate is to build agents to accelerate the production of frontier tokens.You’ll work directly with our founders and embed with our ASIC team to build new agentic harnesses and operating systems to transform the way hardware is built in an AI native world. You’ll work on harnesses, tool use, context, and memory, execution environments, and evals that let agents conduct long-running engineering work that is useful.This role is for engineers who thrive on ambiguity, have real product sense, and want to own problems end to end. It’s a whiteboard for future founders. The problems we solve are time-sensitive and business-critical. This role will not be a 9-5, and the ideal candidate is excited about that.<h3>You may be a good fit if you</h3><ul><li>Have at least 1-5+ years of experience building and shipping software end to end, ideally at a fast-moving startup</li><li>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.</li><li>Are a strong software engineer who has built reliable systems others depend on, such as distributed systems, experiment infrastructure, or developer tooling.</li><li>Use coding agents heavily, read their transcripts closely, and change the system when an agent is confidently wrong.</li><li>Have high agency in unfamiliar domains. You find the real problem and drive it forward.</li><li>Have product sense, design taste, and extreme attention to detail</li></ul><h3>Key Responsibilities</h3><ul><li>Embed with our ASIC team to find the highest-leverage bottlenecks, and own each one from first idea to a tool engineers rely on every day.</li><li>Build and deploy LLM agents wired into our engineering workflows via tool-calling and MCP.</li><li>Build execution environments where agents can verify their own work, with sandboxed access to simulators, EDA flows, compilers, profilers, and real hardware.</li><li>Ship full-stack internal products from zero to one: the interfaces, data pipelines, and infrastructure that define how Etched builds.</li><li>Measure what works. Design evals and track adoption so we double down on the tools that matter and kill the ones that don’t.</li><li>Take on special projects directly with the founders, surfacing problems across the company and doing whatever it takes to hit critical milestones.</li></ul><h3>Strong candidates may also have</h3><ul><li>Exposure to chip development, kernels, hardware, or manufacturing.</li><li>Infrastructure, data engineering, or DevOps experience</li><li>Fine-tuning, RAG over proprietary technical data, or multi-agent orchestration</li><li>Startup experience, especially through hypergrowth</li></ul><h3>Benefits</h3><ul><li>Medical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage<ul><li>$500 per month credit for waiving medical benefits</li></ul></li><li>Housing subsidy of $2,500 per month for those living within walking distance of the office</li><li>Relocation support for those moving to San Jose (Santana Row)</li><li>Various wellness benefits covering fitness, mental health, and more</li><li>Daily lunch and dinner in our office</li><li>Unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification</li></ul><h3>Base Compensation Range</h3><ul><li>$150K – $400K+</li><li>Plus Significant Equity</li></ul><h3>How we’re different</h3>Etched believes in the Bitter Lesson. We are the first inference-focused frontier AI system, betting early on transformer and transformer-like architectures and on increasing model sizes. Our addressable market is the entirety of inference, unlike many of our competitors.We are a fully in-person team in San Jose (Santana Row), and greatly value engineering skills. We do not have boundaries between engineering and research, and we expect all of our technical staff to contribute to both and work across disciplines as needed.<h3>About Etched</h3>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 decode workloads. Our first products are heavily focused on inference. Backed by hundreds of millions from top-tier investors and staffed by leading engineers, Etched is redefining the infrastructure layer for the fastest growing industry in history.

Etched

Open jobs at Etched

Research Engineer, RL Frontiers

Chip Simulation Software Engineer

Internal Acceleration, Research Engineer (Production)

Internal Acceleration, Research Engineer (Hardware)

Internal Acceleration, Research Engineer (ASIC)

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