Etched
Internal Acceleration, Research Engineer (Kernels)
$150K–$400K
San Jose · On-site · Full-time · Posted Oct 15, 2026
- Experience
- At least 1–5+ years building and shipping software end to end.
About the job
Build agentic tools and internal software that help the kernels team accelerate engineering work and hardware development.
What you'll do
- Identify high-impact bottlenecks with the kernels team and build tools engineers use in their daily work.
- Build and deploy LLM agents, tool-calling and MCP workflows, and sandboxed environments for agents to verify their work.
- Ship internal products, design evaluations, measure adoption, and take on founder-led special projects.
What they ask for
- Experience building and shipping software end to end.
- Experience building agents for complex, multi-step tasks, including tool design, long-context management, evaluations, and failure analysis.
- Strong software engineering skills and experience building reliable systems others depend on.
- Use coding agents extensively and inspect their transcripts; demonstrate initiative in unfamiliar domains and product sense.
Nice to have
- Exposure to chip development, kernels, hardware, or manufacturing.
- Infrastructure, data engineering, DevOps, fine-tuning, RAG, multi-agent orchestration, or startup experience.
Pay
$150K – $400K+ USD base salary
Tools
LLM agents, MCP, simulators, EDA flows, compilers, profilers
AI focus
Build agentic harnesses, tools, execution environments, and evaluations for long-running engineering work; integrate LLM agents into engineering workflows.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative