Senior Inference Software Engineer

About Etched

Etched is building AI chips that are hard-coded for individual model architectures. Our first product (Sohu) only supports transformers, but has an order of magnitude more throughput and lower latency than a B200. With Etched ASICs, you can build products that would be impossible with GPUs, like real-time video generation models and extremely deep & parallel chain-of-thought reasoning agents.

Key responsibilities

• Support porting state-of-the-art models to our architecture. Help build programming abstractions and testing capabilities to rapidly iterate on model porting.

• Build, enhance, and scale Sohu’s runtime, including multi-node inference, intra-node execution, state management, and robust error handling.

• Optimize routing and communication layers using Sohu’s collectives.

• Utilize performance profiling and debugging tools to identify bottlenecks and correctness issues.

You may be a good fit if you have

• Proficiency in C++ or Rust.

• Understanding of performance-sensitive or complex distributed software systems like Linux internals, accelerator architectures (e.g. GPUs, TPUs), Compilers, or high-speed interconnects (e.g. NVLink, InfiniBand).

• Familiarity with PyTorch or JAX.

• Ported applications to non-standard accelerator hardware or hardware platforms.

Strong candidates may have some experience with:

• Developed low-latency, high-performance applications using both kernel-level and user-space networking stacks.

• Deep understanding of distributed systems concepts, algorithms, and challenges, including consensus protocols, consistency models, and communication patterns.

• Solid grasp of Transformer architectures, particularly Mixture-of-Experts (MoE).

• Built applications with extensive SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) optimizations for performance-critical paths.

Benefits

• Generous medical, dental, and vision coverage

• Housing subsidy of $2,000/month for those living within walking distance of the office

• Daily lunch and dinner in our office (plus Grubhub credits)

• Relocation support for those who are moving

How we’re different

Etched believes in the Bitter Lesson. We think most of the progress in the AI field has come from using more FLOPs to train and run models, and the best way to get more FLOPs is to build model-specific hardware. Larger and larger training runs encourage companies to consolidate around fewer model architectures, which creates a market for single-model ASICs.

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 as needed.