AI Hardware Acceleration Research Engineer

Job Summary: 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. You may be a good fit if you Have at least 1-5+ years of experience building and shipping software end to end, ideally at a fast-moving startup 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. Are a strong software engineer who has built reliable systems others depend on, such as distributed systems, experiment infrastructure, or developer tooling. Use coding agents heavily, read their transcripts closely, and change the system when an agent is confidently wrong. Have high agency in unfamiliar domains. You find the real problem and drive it forward. Have product sense, design taste, and extreme attention to detail

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. 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.