--- title: 'Core Engineering Intern at Etched' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/core-engineering-intern-etched-san-jose-fcf2ty5ebmnr' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-21' --- # Core Engineering Intern at Etched - **Company:** [Etched](https://feeny.ai/companies/etched) - **Location:** San Jose, CA - **Employment:** internship - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-09-15 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-21 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/etched/494546ec-de37-46a2-b450-692c23b7b0c8 ## Job description ## About Etched Etched is building hardware for frontier intelligence. We co-design chips, racks, software, and manufacturing to deliver best-in-class throughput and latency across prefill and decode. Backed by hundreds of millions from top-tier investors and staffed by leading engineers, we're redefining the infrastructure layer for the fastest growing industry in history. Job Summary Core Engineering is our special projects team. This team identifies critical gaps across Etched and builds solutions 0 to 1, often in days, with immediate feedback loops. You might build internal tools to unblock a hardware team, prototype systems for manufacturing execution, or design, evaluate, and deploy agentic systems for our most challenging R&D problems. 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 exceptional full-stack engineering capabilities, 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. This is not a shadowing program. You will own a real project, scoped to land in production and shape how Etched executes. You may be a good fit if you: - Have a track record of solving hard problems across stacks and domains — you enjoy being dropped into unfamiliar territory and figuring it out - Have something you built that you can walk us through in depth. Depth in one thing beats a list of ten - Are comfortable with Python and TypeScript: you can read it, modify it, debug it, and direct AI to write it well. We don't care whether you write code from scratch, but we do care whether you ship things that work - Have product sense and its necessary prerequisites, from AI tooling proficiency to design taste - Bias towards action and comfort with incomplete information Strong candidates may also have: - Data engineering, infrastructure or DevOps experience, and deploying operational systems in enterprise environments - Experience wielding frontier models on frontier problems: an eval-driven mindset — you measure whether AI systems work, identify where they fall short, and know how to hillclimb - High agency and comfort with ambiguity — you find the real problem to solve - Prior startup experience, especially during hyper growth We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every qualification. Program details - 12-week paid internship (June - August 2026) - Generous housing support for those relocating - Daily lunch and dinner in our office - Based at our office in San Jose, CA - Direct mentorship from industry leaders and world-class engineers - Opportunity to work on one of the most important problems of our time For any questions, contact internships@etched.com ## How we're different Etched believes in the [Bitter Lesson](http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html). 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. We are a fully in-person team in San Jose and Taipei, 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. ## About Etched ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Etched designs and manufactures specialized ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits) that are hardwired to run transformer-based AI models, offering an order-of-magnitude improvement in inference cost and energy efficiency over general-purpose GPUs. - **Entity Type**: Private (Series B / later stage; total raised $800M as of June 2026) - **Headquarters**: San Jose, California, USA (also has offices in Cupertino, CA; Sacramento, CA; and small presence in Taiwan, Canada, UK, Bulgaria) - **Founded**: 2022 - **Founders**: Gavin Uberti (CEO), Robert Wachen (President & COO), Chris Zhu (Co-Founder) ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: AI hardware / semiconductor design / computer hardware manufacturing - **Target customers**: Frontier AI labs, hyperscalers, and enterprises running large-scale transformer inference workloads (B2B, enterprise) - **Mission / purpose**: Build hardware for superintelligence – specifically, the world’s most powerful servers for transformer inference. ## Products & Services - **Sohu Chip (ASIC)**: A transformer-specific ASIC manufactured by TSMC. It burns the transformer architecture directly into silicon, eliminating the overhead of general-purpose GPUs for inference. - **Frontier Inference Clusters**: Full-stack systems that bundle the Sohu chip with custom-designed racks, networking, and software. Customers place orders for complete systems, not just chips. Etched claims they deliver more tokens per dollar and per watt for dense models, sparse MoEs, diffusion models, and more. - **Software Stack**: Includes compiler and runtime optimizations built by a team with deep experience (former Apache TVM developer, ex-Google TPU software lead). ## Market Standing - **Valuation**: $5 billion post-money valuation (as of December 2025 / disclosed June 2026) - **Key Metric**: $1 billion in contract orders (booked) for its systems; total funding of $800M (including an unannounced $500M round closed Dec 2025 led by Stripes) - **Notable Investors**: Stripes (lead), VentureTech Alliance, Jane Street, Hudson River Trading, Two Sigma, Ribbit Capital. Angel investors include Andrej Karpathy, Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Arthur Mensch, Scott Wu, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Thiel. Earlier backers: Positive Sum, Primary Venture Partners. - **Growth Signals**: - Headcount: 258 employees (as of mid-2026), up 141% year-over-year - 100+ active job postings across engineering, operations, and business functions - $500M raise in late 2025; first chip manufactured by TSMC in 2025 and now being tested with customers - Talent sources include Google (21), Apple (17), NVIDIA (16), Tesla (11), Intel (10), AMD (5) ## Competitive Advantages - **Transformer-specific architecture**: Unlike GPUs (which are general-purpose), Etched’s chip is hardwired only for transformer operations, enabling drastically lower cost and latency for today’s dominant AI model architecture. - **Full-stack system play**: By selling entire inference clusters (chip + rack + software), Etched captures more value and delivers a turnkey solution competitive with NVIDIA’s DGX/HGX systems. - **Deeply experienced leadership**: - CEO Gavin Uberti (Harvard math researcher, AI compiler expert, Apache TVM contributor) - President Robert Wachen (co-founded Prod AI incubator; Thiel Fellow) - VP of Platform (ex-NVIDIA 22 years, built HGX/DGX systems) - VP of Software (ex-Google DeepMind, lead TPU v1–v5 software) - Chief Architect Saptadeep Pal (former Auradine co-founder, chiplet expert) - VP of Hardware Engineering Ajat Hukkoo (ex-Cypress CTO, shipped >$1B revenue products) ## Strategic Focus - **Scale manufacturing and customer deliveries**: With the first chip successfully fabricated, the company is now testing production systems and aims to fulfill $1B in pre-orders. - **Expand engineering talent**: Aggressively hiring across silicon design, validation, infrastructure, optics, and software to support volume ramp. - **Maintain technological lead**: Continue refining the ASIC for future transformer variants and MoE mixtures while building out a partner ecosystem. ## Why Work Here - **Mission-driven, high-impact engineering**: “Building the hardware for superintelligence” – the company is solving one of the hardest problems in compute (inference efficiency) with a focused team. - **Top-tier team and learning environment**: Colleagues from Google, NVIDIA, Apple, Tesla, Broadcom, and Intel; exposure to full-stack chip-to-system design. - **In-office culture**: All roles are in-office (Cupertino and San Jose, CA). The company emphasizes on-site collaboration for hardware development. Notable perks are not heavily advertised, but compensation is competitive for the AI hardware space (equity-heavy). - **Growth trajectory**: 141% headcount growth YoY, hundreds of open roles, and a $5B valuation signal strong backing and career acceleration potential. - **Intellectual challenge**: Work on chip simulation, RTL design, system validation, or software infrastructure for cutting-edge AI inference. ## Sources 1. [etched.com/careers](https://www.etched.com/careers) 2. [builtin.com/company/etched](https://builtin.com/company/etched) 3. [linkedin.com/company/etched-ai](https://www.linkedin.com/company/etched-ai) 4. [cbinsights.com/company/etched](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/etched) 5. [techcrunch.com/2026/06/30/nvidia-competitor-etched-hits-5b-valuation-1b-in-sales-for-ai-chip/](https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/30/nvidia-competitor-etched-hits-5b-valuation-1b-in-sales-for-ai-chip/) ## Other roles at Etched - [PCB Layout Engineer (Taiwan)](https://feeny.ai/job/pcb-layout-engineer-taiwan-etched-taipei-a7v0shj39g2r) — Taipei, Taiwan - [RTL Intern](https://feeny.ai/job/rtl-intern-etched-san-jose-py8mtp2w9mnh) — San Jose, CA - [Substrate IC Package Layout Design Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/substrate-ic-package-layout-design-engineer-etched-taipei-jjnjt1n87wvc) — Taipei, Taiwan - [People Operations Intern](https://feeny.ai/job/people-operations-intern-etched-san-jose-5x10spas3sqz) — San Jose, CA - [Lab Operations Intern](https://feeny.ai/job/lab-operations-intern-etched-san-jose-z8x2pwy8t3h1) — San Jose, CA - [EE Hardware System Engineer (TW)](https://feeny.ai/job/ee-hardware-system-engineer-tw-etched-taipei-fgncym9kzy6w) — Taipei, Taiwan - [Silicon Validation Engineer, Software](https://feeny.ai/job/silicon-validation-engineer-software-etched-san-jose-qhp3k9xqy5vr) — San Jose, CA - [RMA & Repair Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/rma-repair-lead-etched-san-jose-q0tmchh0yyrj) — San Jose, CA - [Advanced Packaging SI/PI Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/advanced-packaging-si-pi-engineer-etched-san-jose-47he7k0hp901) — San Jose, CA - [Substrate IC Package Layout Design Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/substrate-ic-package-layout-design-engineer-etched-san-jose-g36wmxc8ww9r) — San Jose, CA