---
title: 'IA Research Engineer Intern at Etched'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/ia-research-engineer-intern-etched-san-jose-vhnrfnhzby7x'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-09'
---

# IA Research Engineer Intern at Etched

- **Company:** [Etched](https://feeny.ai/companies/etched)
- **Location:** San Jose, CA
- **Employment:** internship
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-11-04
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-09
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Etched/05d67dff-a7a4-4ece-a809-3200d95e7440

## 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 We are seeking talented Spring ‘27 and Summer ‘27 IA Research Engineer interns to build the agents that accelerate how Etched produces frontier tokens. You will embed with our kernels team and work alongside our founders on agentic harnesses, tools, and evals that let agents do long-running engineering work people actually rely on. This role is for builders who thrive on ambiguity, have real product sense, and want to own problems end to end.

## Key responsibilities

- Embed with our kernels team to find high-leverage bottlenecks and help turn them into tools engineers use every day.
- Build and deploy LLM agents wired into our engineering workflows via tool-calling and MCP.
- Help build execution environments where agents can verify their own work, with sandboxed access to simulators, compilers, profilers, and real hardware.
- Ship internal products end to end, including the interfaces, data pipelines, and infrastructure behind them.
- Design evals and track adoption to measure which tools are working and which aren’t.
- Support special projects with the founders across the company.

You may be a good fit if you have

- Progress towards a Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD degree in computer science, computer engineering, or a related field
- Strong software engineering fundamentals and a record of shipping projects other people use
- Built agents for multi-step tasks beyond calling an API: tool design, context management, evals, and failure analysis
- Heavy use of coding agents, including reading their transcripts and changing the system when an agent is confidently wrong
- High agency in unfamiliar domains, product sense, and extreme attention to detail

Strong candidates may have some experience with

- Chip development, GPU kernels, hardware, or manufacturing
- Infrastructure, data engineering, or DevOps
- Fine-tuning, RAG over technical data, or multi-agent orchestration
- Hackathons, startups, or side projects with real users

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every qualification.

Program details

- 12-week paid internship
- 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. 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.

## 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

- [Electrical Engineer - Next Gen Development  (TW)](https://feeny.ai/job/electrical-engineer-next-gen-development-tw-etched-taipei-1p5eavhnv899) — Taipei, Taiwan
- [Infrastructure Engineering & Projects Intern](https://feeny.ai/job/infrastructure-engineering-projects-intern-etched-san-jose-nex7pv255w2v) — San Jose, CA
- [Site Reliability Engineer - Fleet Command & Control](https://feeny.ai/job/site-reliability-engineer-fleet-command-control-etched-san-jose-q5m27r8np5cv) — San Jose, CA
- [Chip Simulation Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/chip-simulation-lead-etched-san-jose-6d9bt85ms6tx) — San Jose, CA
- [Build Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/build-engineer-etched-san-jose-zmxm6znacgm1) — San Jose, CA
- [Inventory Site Lead (Milpitas)](https://feeny.ai/job/inventory-site-lead-milpitas-etched-san-jose-n83f9gpfm42w) — San Jose, CA
- [Strategic Buyer](https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-buyer-etched-san-jose-e9vh7zjgpwv0) — San Jose, CA
- [People Operations Generalist](https://feeny.ai/job/people-operations-generalist-etched-san-jose-mct9adxz70g2) — San Jose, CA
- [Manufacturing Operations Program Manager (Taiwan)](https://feeny.ai/job/manufacturing-operations-program-manager-taiwan-etched-taoyuan-a7vyayy8zrh7) — Taoyuan, Taiwan
- [Core Engineering Intern](https://feeny.ai/job/core-engineering-intern-etched-san-jose-b2df2xe1eezt) — San Jose, CA