Co-designed chips, racks, and software to push the pareto frontier to best-in-class throughput and interactivity. Backed by Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia.
About the role
Every model release presents a new opportunity to push the frontier on kernel engineering. Future performance breakthroughs will come from AI systems that can understand model architectures and hardware, run thousands of experiments, learn from profiler feedback, and discover the most performant implementations faster than the best engineers.
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
- Comfort with both Python and low-level code: you can read it, modify it, debug it, and direct AI to write it well. We do not care whether you write code from scratch — we care whether you ship things that work
- Kernel experience: you've written or tuned kernels and can explain the mechanisms and performance impact of optimizations you’ve shipped
- 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
- Moving fluidly between research exploration, agentic experimentation, low-level debugging, and production execution
- First principles thinking on accelerator performance: memory hierarchy, data movement, parallelism, synchronization, and low-precision computation
More about this role
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.
Every model release presents a new opportunity to push the frontier on kernel engineering. Future performance breakthroughs will come from AI systems that can understand model architectures and hardware, run thousands of experiments, learn from profiler feedback, and discover the most performant implementations faster than the best engineers.
You will build that system. Your mandate is to build AI systems that autonomously turn newly released model architectures into correct, production-ready implementations optimized for Etched hardware. These systems should explore broader design spaces, learn from every experiment, and reach peak performance faster than any traditional kernel-development workflows.
Etched offers a uniquely tight research loop:...
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