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 prefill and decode. Backed by hundreds of millions from top-tier investors and staffed by leading engineers, we're redefining the infrastructure layer for the fastest growing industry in history.
Job Summary
Core Engineering is our special projects team. This team identifies critical gaps across Etched and builds solutions 0 to 1, often in days, with immediate feedback loops. You might build internal tools to unblock a hardware team, prototype systems for manufacturing execution, or design, evaluate, and deploy agentic systems for our most challenging R&D problems.
This role is for engineers who thrive on ambiguity, move fast without sacrificing quality, and get energy from solving whatever problem matters most right now. It is a whiteboard for future founders – if you're interested in shipping 0-1 production-level code every week, this role is for you.
This role requires exceptional full-stack engineering capabilities, deep product sense, personal accountability, and a knack for building from the ground up. At Etched, we're developing our processes for scale, and we're looking for engineers to deploy to our toughest challenges. 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. This is not a shadowing program. You will own a real project, scoped to land in production and shape how Etched executes.
You may be a good fit if you:
Have a track record of solving hard problems across stacks and domains — you enjoy being dropped into unfamiliar territory and figuring it out
Have something you built that you can walk us through in depth. Depth in one thing beats a list of ten
Are comfortable with Python and TypeScript: you can read it, modify it, debug it, and direct AI to write it well. We don't care whether you write code from scratch, but we do care whether you ship things that work
Have product sense and its necessary prerequisites, from AI tooling proficiency to design taste
Bias towards action and comfort with incomplete information
Strong candidates may also have:
Data engineering, infrastructure or DevOps experience, and deploying operational systems in enterprise environments
Experience wielding frontier models on frontier problems: an eval-driven mindset — you measure whether AI systems work, identify where they fall short, and know how to hillclimb
High agency and comfort with ambiguity — you find the real problem to solve
Prior startup experience, especially during hyper growth
We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every qualification.
Program details
12-week paid internship (June - August 2026)
Generous housing support for those relocating
Daily lunch and dinner in our office
Based at our office in San Jose, CA
Direct mentorship from industry leaders and world-class engineers
Opportunity to work on one of the most important problems of our time
For any questions, contact [email protected]
How we're different
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.
We are a fully in-person team in San Jose and Taipei, 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.
Skills Required
- Comfortable reading, modifying, debugging, and directing AI to write Python and TypeScript code
- Track record of solving difficult problems across stacks and domains
- A project or system built independently that can be explained in depth
- Product sense and AI tooling proficiency
- Bias toward action and comfort working with incomplete information
- Data engineering, infrastructure, or DevOps experience
- Experience deploying operational systems in enterprise environments
- Experience evaluating and improving frontier AI models
- Prior startup experience, especially in a hypergrowth environment
Etched Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Etched and has not been reviewed or approved by Etched.
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Equity Value & Accessibility — Equity growth is described as strong and significant equity is part of the package. High total compensation for technical roles reinforces the equity-led upside.
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Healthcare Strength — Medical, dental, and vision coverage include generous premium support, indicating robust core healthcare. This reduces employee cost exposure for essential coverage.
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Wellbeing & Lifestyle Benefits — Daily lunch and dinner, a housing subsidy for those living near the office, relocation support, and wellness perks are highlighted. These offerings lower day-to-day living costs and support practical wellbeing.
Etched Insights
What We Do
By burning the transformer architecture into our chips, we’re creating the world’s most powerful servers for transformer inference.
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