{"id":2653139,"url":"https://alion.io/job/etched-internal-acceleration-research-engineer-asic","title":"Internal Acceleration, Research Engineer (ASIC)","company":{"id":5021,"name":"Etched","domain":"etched.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/etched","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":90,"open_postings":79,"ghost_share":0.076,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":162,"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"}},"role":"Hardware","role_family":"Hardware","seniority":"junior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Jose, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":150000,"max":400000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":400000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":1,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":false},{"name":"Multi-Agent Systems","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Tool Use","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-15T22:06:34Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-15","last_verified_at":"2026-10-17T13:08:57Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":1,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":["company_stale"],"days_open":1},"description":"Job Summary\nOur Internal Acceleration team’s mandate is to build agents to accelerate the production of frontier tokens.\nYou’ll work directly with our founders and embed with the teams building the product (kernels, ASIC, hardware, production, and special projects) to build new agentic harnesses and operating systems to transform the way hardware is built in an AI native world. You’ll work on harnesses, tool use, context, and memory, execution environments, and evals that let agents conduct long-running engineering work that is useful.\nThis role is for engineers who thrive on ambiguity, have real product sense, and want to own problems end to end. It’s a whiteboard for future founders. The problems we solve are time-sensitive and business-critical. This role will not be a 9-5, and the ideal candidate is excited about that.\nYou may be a good fit if you\nHave at least 1-5+ years of experience building and shipping software end to end, ideally at a fast-moving startup\n\nHave built agents for complex, multi-step tasks that people depend on, beyond calling an API: tool design, long-context management, evals, and failure analysis.\n\nAre a strong software engineer who has built reliable systems others depend on, such as distributed systems, experiment infrastructure, or developer tooling.\n\nUse coding agents heavily, read their transcripts closely, and change the system when an agent is confidently wrong.\n\nHave high agency in unfamiliar domains. You find the real problem and drive it forward.\n\nHave product sense, design taste, and extreme attention to detail\n\nKey Responsibilities\nEmbed with kernels, ASIC, hardware, and production teams to find the highest-leverage bottlenecks, and own each one from first idea to a tool engineers rely on every day.\n\nBuild and deploy LLM agents wired into our engineering workflows via tool-calling and MCP.\n\nBuild execution environments where agents can verify their own work, with sandboxed access to simulators, EDA flows, compilers, profilers, and real hardware.\n\nShip full-stack internal products from zero to one: the interfaces, data pipelines, and infrastructure that define how Etched builds.\n\nMeasure what works. Design evals and track adoption so we double down on the tools that matter and kill the ones that don’t.\n\nTake on special projects directly with the founders, surfacing problems across the company and doing whatever it takes to hit critical milestones.\n\nStrong candidates may also have\nExposure to chip development, kernels, hardware, or manufacturing.\n\nInfrastructure, data engineering, or DevOps experience\n\nFine-tuning, RAG over proprietary technical data, or multi-agent orchestration\n\nStartup experience, especially through hypergrowth\n\nBenefits\nMedical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage\n$500 per month credit for waiving medical benefits\n\nHousing subsidy of $2,500 per month for those living within walking distance of the office\n\nRelocation support for those moving to San Jose (Santana Row)\n\nVarious wellness benefits covering fitness, mental health, and more\n\nDaily lunch and dinner in our office\n\nUnlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification\n\nBase Compensation Range\n$150K - $400K+\n\nPlus Significant Equity\n\nHow we’re different\nEtched believes in the Bitter Lesson. We are the first inference-focused frontier AI system, betting early on transformer and transformer-like architectures and on increasing model sizes. Our addressable market is the entirety of inference, unlike many of our competitors.\nWe are a fully in-person team in San Jose (Santana Row), and greatly value engineering skills. We do not have boundaries between engineering and research, and we expect all of our technical staff to contribute to both and work across disciplines as needed.\nAbout Etched\nEtched is building hardware for frontier intelligence. We co-design chips, racks, software, and manufacturing to deliver best-in-class throughput and latency across both prefill and decode workloads. Our first products are heavily focused on inference. Backed by hundreds of millions from top-tier investors and staffed by leading engineers, Etched is redefining the infrastructure layer for the fastest growing industry in history.","description_format":"text","description_chars":4222,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":1,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":true,"industries":["Processors, MCUs & AI Chips","AI Compute & Inference","AI Chips & Accelerators"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-15T22:23:04Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 5","filings_12m":5,"filings_prev_12m":0,"green_card_filings_12m":0,"median_offered_wage_usd":173500,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-15T11:24:14+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)"],"filings_for_role_12m":5}],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":1,"expected_fill_days":162,"reasons":["conf:2","velocity","win:early","comp:junior"],"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":400000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/etched-internal-acceleration-research-engineer-asic","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/etched-internal-acceleration-research-engineer-asic.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-17T14:07:21Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":19014,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-18T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":5021},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=5021"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fetched-internal-acceleration-research-engineer-asic"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fetched-internal-acceleration-research-engineer-asic"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fetched-internal-acceleration-research-engineer-asic"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/etched-internal-acceleration-research-engineer-asic\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fetched-internal-acceleration-research-engineer-asic"}]}