# Applied AI Engineer, Kernel Performance 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 $225K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-07-23
- Apply by: 2026-10-08
- Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/etched/b09ced5f-c81a-4fbe-a85e-ed743c991e21
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/etched-applied-ai-engineer-kernel-performance/

## 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

Tags: Software