# Applied AI Engineer - Hardware at Etched

- Company: Etched
- What the company does: Co-designed chips, racks, and software to push the pareto frontier to best-in-class throughput and interactivity. Backed by Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia.
- Company website: https://www.etched.com/
- Type: Startups (AI role)
- Level: Mid level
- Location: San Jose
- Work setup: On-site
- Pay: $150K to $250K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-09-24
- Apply by: 2026-11-08
- Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/etched/ff056a35-b6d8-42c9-8a02-f07c29089c68
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/etched-applied-ai-engineer-hardware/

## About the role

Designing frontier AI hardware means solving electrical and mechanical problems together: schematics and board layouts, power delivery and signal integrity, packaging and cooling, manufacturing and assembly. Every decision changes the constraints on the next. Future breakthroughs will come from AI systems that can reason across these domains, operate engineering tools, run thousands of experiments, and learn which designs work in the physical world.

## What they're looking for

- A track record of solving hard problems across stacks and domains—you enjoy being dropped into unfamiliar territory and figuring it out
- Hands-on experience building and shipping LLM-based agents or AI tooling that people depend on: context engineering, tool integration, orchestration, evaluation, and failure analysis
- Fluency using AI to learn and ramp on new problems—agentic coding tools, deep research, and frontier models are how you work, not an add-on
- An eval-driven mindset: you measure whether AI systems work, investigate where they fail, and use those failures to improve them
- Comfort moving between research exploration, agentic experimentation, engineering-tool debugging, and production execution
- High agency and comfort with ambiguity—you find the real problem to solve

Tags: Software