Etched
Applied AI Engineer, Silicon Engineering
San Jose
Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 30 days ago
PythonRustC++DockerCI/CDNLPLLMsRAGAgentic AIAI OrchestrationFPGAVerilogResearch
About the role
- AI agents are starting to genuinely work for verification, debug, and EDA flows - we want someone to bring that inside Etched and push past it.
- This is an internal, force-multiplier role: your success is measured by how much faster the chip team moves, not by lines of code you ship yourself.
- You do not need to be a chip designer or a traditional software engineer - you need to be an exceptional problem solver who has shipped real agentic systems, works comfortably across stacks and domains, and uses AI to ramp on hard new problems fast.
Responsibilities
- Design rigorous evals for agent performance on real silicon-engineering tasks - not proxy metrics - and use them to drive iteration
- Champion adoption: documentation, training, and fast feedback loops with the engineers who use what you build
- Hands-on experience building and shipping LLM-based agents or AI tooling that real users depend on (beyond calling an API - context engineering, tool integration, orchestration, failure analysis)
- Relocation support for those moving to San Jose (Santana Row)
Requirements
- A track record of solving hard problems across stacks and domains - you enjoy being dropped into unfamiliar territory and figuring it out
- You may be a good fit if you have
- Comfort with Python and code: you can read it, modify it, debug it, and direct AI to write it well.
- Fluency using AI to learn and ramp on new problems - agentic coding tools, deep research, and frontier models are how you work, not an add-on
- Strong candidates may also have experience with
Nice to have
- EDA tool flows and Tcl scripting
- reading waveforms, logs, and regressions
- Fine-tuning or post-training (SFT, RLHF/DPO), RAG over proprietary technical data, or multi-agent orchestration
- High agency and comfort with ambiguity - you can find the problem, not just solve the stated one
- Interest in chip development and the ability to ramp quickly on a deeply technical domain.
- Hardware experience is a real plus, but not required - you will be willing and able to learn quickly
Skills
- About Etched
- Etched is building hardware for frontier intelligence.
- Our first products are heavily focused on inference.
Benefits
- Full medical, dental, and vision packages, with generous premium coverage
- Build, deploy, and maintain LLM-agent workflows that accelerate chip development: debug triage, testbench and coverage work, log/waveform analysis, EDA script generation, and engineering knowledge retrieval
Company info
- We are the first inference-focused frontier AI system, betting early on transformer and transformer-like architectures and on increasing model sizes.
- We are a fully in-person team in San Jose (Santana Row), and greatly value engineering skills.
This listing is sourced directly from Etched's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.