Internal Acceleration, Research Engineer (ASIC)

Job Title

Internal Acceleration, Research Engineer (ASIC)

Role Summary

This position builds agentic systems and execution environments that accelerate ASIC engineering work. You will embed with the ASIC team, work with the founders, and own tools, pipelines, and evals from concept to production.

The team is fully in-person in San Jose (Santana Row). Base compensation range stated by the employer is $150K–$400K+ plus equity and standard benefits.

Experience Level

Mid-level. The posting requests approximately 1–5+ years of experience building and shipping software end-to-end, ideally in a fast-moving startup.

Responsibilities

Work cross-functionally with ASIC engineers and founders to design, build, and operate internal agentic tools that materially improve engineering productivity.

• Embed with the ASIC team to identify high-leverage bottlenecks and own solutions from prototype to daily-use tooling.
• Build and deploy LLM-driven agents integrated into engineering workflows via tool-calling and orchestration.
• Create execution environments where agents can verify work, including sandboxed access to simulators, EDA flows, compilers, profilers, and hardware.
• Ship full-stack internal products: interfaces, data pipelines, and infrastructure that define development processes.
• Design evals, track adoption, and iterate on tools based on measured impact.
• Take on high-impact special projects with the founders to hit critical company milestones.

Requirements

Core qualifications and skills required to perform the role.

Must-have:

• 1–5+ years building and shipping software end-to-end; demonstrated product sense and ownership.
• Experience building agents for complex multi-step tasks beyond simple API calls: tool design, long-context management, evals, and failure analysis.
• Strong software engineering background with experience building reliable systems others depend on (distributed systems, experiment infra, or developer tooling).
• Familiarity using coding agents and analyzing agent transcripts to correct behavior and improve systems.
• High agency in unfamiliar domains, strong attention to detail, and the ability to drive ambiguous projects to completion.

Nice-to-have:

• Exposure to chip development, kernels, hardware, or manufacturing.
• Infrastructure, data engineering, or DevOps experience.
• Experience with fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation over proprietary technical data, or multi-agent orchestration.
• Startup experience, particularly through periods of rapid growth.

Education Requirements

Not specified.

About the Company

Company: Etched

Headquarters: San Jose, CA, United States

Etched develops purpose-built AI inference ASICs and systems optimized for transformer models, aiming to deliver significantly higher performance, lower cost, and lower latency than GPUs. The company focuses on enabling applications like real-time video generation and advanced reasoning agents, and is backed by leading investors and engineers.