Core Software Engineer

About Etched

Etched is building the world’s first AI inference system purpose-built for transformers - delivering over 10x higher performance and dramatically lower cost and latency than a B200. With Etched ASICs, you can build products that would be impossible with GPUs, like real-time video generation models and extremely deep & parallel chain-of-thought reasoning agents. 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.

Job Summary

Build the products that will power a majority of the world’s inference. The Core Engineering team is our special forces. This role works directly with our founders to identify critical gaps across the organization and build solutions 0 to 1, often in days not weeks, with immediate feedback loops. Your projects will vary widely: one week you might build internal infrastructure to unblock a hardware team, the next you might prototype a deployment for a customer or stand up a new tooling workflow.

This role is for engineers who thrive on ambiguity, move fast without sacrificing quality, and get energy from solving whatever problem matters most right now. It is a whiteboard for future founders – if you’re interested in shipping 0-1 production-level code every week, this role is for you.

This role requires not only exceptional full-stack engineering capabilities, but also deep product sense, personal accountability, and a knack for building from the ground up. At Etched, we’re developing our processes for scale, and we’re looking for engineers to deploy to our toughest challenges. 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.

Key Responsibilities

• Detect problems and inefficiencies across the organization, bringing them to the attention of the executive team, and develop custom applications and projects for each need. The ideal candidate should be comfortable shipping from scratch every week.

• Work cross-functionally to execute special projects between the executive team and the rest of the organization.

• Define and represent operational milestones by collecting company data, developing business intuitions, and executing whatever needs to be done to meet them.

• Design the interfaces, developer workflows, and critical infrastructure that will define the company’s technical foundation.

You may be a good fit if you

• Strong full-stack skills (TypeScript, React, Python).

• 1-5 years of experience building and shipping software end to end, ideally in a startup environment.

• Product sense and its necessary prerequisites, from AI tooling proficiency to design taste.

• Bias towards action and comfort with incomplete information.

• Ability to continuously learn, set metrics, and solve problems with minimal supervision and maximum impact.

• Excitement for solving technical problems with data structures, storage systems, cloud infrastructure, front-end frameworks, and other technical tools.

Strong candidates may also have experience with

• Infrastructure or DevOps experience

• Prior startup experience, especially during hyper growth

• Deploying AI systems in enterprise environments

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage

  • $500 per month credit for waiving medical benefits

• Housing subsidy of $2k 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 + dinner in our office

How we’re different

Etched believes in the Bitter Lesson. We think most of the progress in the AI field has come from using more FLOPs to train and run models, and the best way to get more FLOPs is to build model-specific hardware. Larger and larger training runs encourage companies to consolidate around fewer model architectures, which creates a market for single-model ASICs.

We 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 as needed.