IA Research Engineer Intern

The role

You will build agents that accelerate how Etched produces frontier tokens. You will embed with the kernels team to work on agentic harnesses, tools, and evals.

What you will do

• Embed with the kernels team to find high-leverage bottlenecks and turn them into tools.
• Build and deploy LLM agents wired into engineering workflows via tool-calling and MCP.
• Help build execution environments where agents can verify their own work.
• Ship internal products end to end, including interfaces, data pipelines, and infrastructure.
• Design evals and track adoption to measure tool effectiveness.
• Support special projects with the founders across the company.

Required qualifications

• Progress towards a Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD degree in computer science, computer engineering, or a related field
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and a record of shipping projects other people use
• Built agents for multi-step tasks beyond calling an API: tool design, context management, evals, and failure analysis
• Heavy use of coding agents, including reading their transcripts and changing the system when an agent is confidently wrong
• High agency in unfamiliar domains, product sense, and extreme attention to detail

Nice to have

• Chip development, GPU kernels, hardware, or manufacturing
• Infrastructure, data engineering, or DevOps
• Fine-tuning, RAG over technical data, or multi-agent orchestration
• Hackathons, startups, or side projects with real users

Benefits

• Daily lunch and dinner in our office
• Direct mentorship from industry leaders and world-class engineers
• Opportunity to work on one of the most important problems of our time

About the company

Etched is building hardware for frontier intelligence by co-designing chips, racks, software, and manufacturing. They are a fully in-person team in San Jose focused on inference.