Firmware Intern at Etched (San Jose, CA)
Etched· San Jose, CA·
Role details
12-Week Paid Internship · Generous Housing Support For Those Relocating · Daily Lunch And Dinner In Office
Etched at a glance
Transformer-specific ASICs and rack-scale systems that hardwire the transformer into silicon for faster, cheaper AI inference.
Etched designs transformer-specific ASICs and full rack-scale inference systems. Its Sohu chip hardwires the transformer architecture directly into silicon, trading a GPU's general-purpose flexibility for far higher throughput, lower latency, and better power efficiency on AI inference. Customers buy complete co-designed clusters, chip plus rack plus software, not standalone chips.
$800M raised · latest: $500M · led by Stripes · Dec 2025 (reported Jan 2026) · backed by Stripes, Peter Thiel, Ribbit Capital, VentureTech Alliance
Summary
Develop firmware for custom ASICs to run large transformer models efficiently. Work across the stack including low-level drivers, hardware interfaces, and system initialization to ensure reliable hardware operation and peak performance for high-throughput inference.
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 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.
Job Summary
In our firmware role, you will help develop firmware for our chips, designed to run large AI models efficiently. You’ll work across the stack—from low-level drivers, hardware interfaces, and system initialization code to integration with runtime libraries and model-execution frameworks. Your work will focus on making the hardware operate reliably and at peak performance, enabling high-throughput inference and training workloads. You’ll collaborate with hardware, architecture, and software teams to bring up new silicon, validate features, and support real-world AI applications. We are looking for Summer '26, Fall '26, Spring '27, and Summer '27 interns.
You may be a good fit if you have
- Progress towards a Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
- Proficiency in C/C++ or Rust
- Strong fundamentals in data structures and algorithms
- Strong understanding of low-level software engineering
- Strong understanding of hardware/software co-design
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills
Strong candidates may also have (Nice to have qualifications)
- Experience with Linux internals, kernel development, or driver debugging
- Experience with hardware diagnostics or interpreting hardware logs
- Exposure to server virtualization or CI/CD pipelines
- Experience with Rust or embedded development
We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every qualification.
Program details
- 12-week paid internship
- 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 incompleteideas.net/BitterLesson.html. We are the first inference-focused frontier AI system. Our addressable market is the entirety of inference, unlike many of our competitors.
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 and work across disciplines as needed.
Why work at Etched
- 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.