IA Research Engineer - Kernels - Intern

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 (Kernels) 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

• 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. 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.