Internal Acceleration, Research Engineer (Kernels)

The role

You will build agents to accelerate the production of frontier tokens. You will work with founders and the kernels team to build agentic harnesses, operating systems, execution environments, and evals.

What you will do

• Embed with the kernels team to find and own high-leverage bottlenecks.
• Build and deploy LLM agents wired into engineering workflows via tool-calling and MCP.
• Build execution environments where agents can verify their own work with sandboxed access.
• Ship full-stack internal products from zero to one.
• Design evals and track adoption to measure what works.
• Take on special projects directly with the founders.

Required qualifications

• At least 1-5+ years of experience building and shipping software end to end.
• Built agents for complex, multi-step tasks including tool design, long-context management, evals, and failure analysis.
• Strong software engineer who has built reliable systems such as distributed systems, experiment infrastructure, or developer tooling.
• Use coding agents heavily and change the system when an agent is confidently wrong.
• High agency in unfamiliar domains.
• Product sense, design taste, and extreme attention to detail.

Nice to have

• Exposure to chip development, kernels, hardware, or manufacturing.
• Infrastructure, data engineering, or DevOps experience
• Fine-tuning, RAG over proprietary technical data, or multi-agent orchestration
• Startup experience, especially through hypergrowth

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage
• $500 per month credit for waiving medical benefits
• Housing subsidy of $2,500 per month for those living within walking distance of the office
• Relocation support for those moving to San Jose (Santana Row)
• Various wellness benefits covering fitness, mental health, and more
• Daily lunch and dinner in our office
• Unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification

About the company

Etched is building hardware for frontier intelligence by co-designing chips, racks, software, and manufacturing. They are an inference-focused frontier AI system backed by hundreds of millions from top-tier investors.