Internal Acceleration, Research Engineer (Hardware)

Job Title

Internal Acceleration, Research Engineer (Hardware)

Role Summary

Join Etched's Internal Acceleration team to build agentic systems that accelerate hardware development. You will embed with the hardware team to design agent harnesses, execution environments, and evals that enable long-running, automated engineering workflows.

This role requires end-to-end ownership of internal tooling and production systems that materially improve hardware engineering velocity and quality.

Experience Level

Mid-level - typically 1–5+ years building and shipping software end-to-end, preferably at a fast-moving startup.

Responsibilities

Primary responsibilities focus on embedding with hardware engineers, building agent-driven tooling, and shipping internal products from zero to one.

• Identify high-leverage engineering bottlenecks and deliver tools that teams rely on daily.
• Design, build, and deploy LLM agents integrated into engineering workflows via tool-calling and multi-component protocols.
• Build execution environments where agents can test and verify work, with sandboxed access to simulators, EDA flows, compilers, profilers, and hardware.
• Ship full-stack internal products: interfaces, data pipelines, and backend infrastructure.
• Design evaluations, measure adoption, and iterate on tools to focus on what drives impact.
• Lead special projects with founders to resolve cross-company technical challenges and hit critical milestones.

Requirements

Must-have technical skills and attributes required to succeed in this role.

• 1–5+ years building and shipping reliable software systems end-to-end.
• Experience building agents for complex, multi-step tasks beyond simple API calls (tool design, long-context management, evals, failure analysis).
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience with systems others depend on (distributed systems, experiment infra, developer tooling).
• Comfort using and iterating on coding agents: reviewing transcripts and modifying systems when agents are wrong.
• High agency in unfamiliar domains; ability to find root problems and drive them to resolution.
• Product sense, design taste, and strong attention to detail.
• Willingness to work in a fast-paced, in-person environment and take on time-sensitive, business-critical tasks.

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, especially during hypergrowth.

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.