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 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 Summary
We are seeking talented Spring ‘27 and Summer ‘27 IA Research Engineer (Kernels) interns to build the agents that accelerate how Etched produces frontier tokens. You will embed with our kernels team and work alongside our founders on agentic harnesses, tools, and evals that let agents do long-running engineering work people actually rely on. This role is for builders who thrive on ambiguity, have real product sense, and want to own problems end to end.
Key responsibilities
Embed with our kernels team to find high-leverage bottlenecks and help turn them into tools engineers use every day.
Build and deploy LLM agents wired into our engineering workflows via tool-calling and MCP.
Help build execution environments where agents can verify their own work, with sandboxed access to simulators, compilers, profilers, and real hardware.
Ship internal products end to end, including the interfaces, data pipelines, and infrastructure behind them.
Design evals and track adoption to measure which tools are working and which aren’t.
Support special projects with the founders across the company.
You may be a good fit if you have
Progress towards a Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD degree in computer science, computer engineering, or a related field
Strong software engineering fundamentals and a record of shipping projects other people use
Built agents for multi-step tasks beyond calling an API: tool design, context management, evals, and failure analysis
Heavy use of coding agents, including reading their transcripts and changing the system when an agent is confidently wrong
High agency in unfamiliar domains, product sense, and extreme attention to detail
Strong candidates may have some experience with
Chip development, GPU kernels, hardware, or manufacturing
Infrastructure, data engineering, or DevOps
Fine-tuning, RAG over technical data, or multi-agent orchestration
Hackathons, startups, or side projects with real users
We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every qualification.
Program details
12-week paid internship
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. 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.
Skills Required
- Progress toward a Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD degree in computer science, computer engineering, or a related field
- Strong software engineering fundamentals
- Record of shipping projects used by other people
- Experience building agents for multi-step tasks, including tool design, context management, evaluations, and failure analysis
- Heavy use of coding agents, including reviewing transcripts and correcting confidently wrong agent behavior
- High agency in unfamiliar domains, product sense, and extreme attention to detail
- Experience with chip development, GPU kernels, hardware, or manufacturing
- Experience with infrastructure, data engineering, or DevOps
- Experience with fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation over technical data, or multi-agent orchestration
- Experience with hackathons, startups, or side projects with real users
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.
