# Applied AI Engineer, Silicon Engineering 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 $275K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-06-21
- Apply by: 2026-10-08
- Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/etched/831bfa22-d883-450b-9b10-2a16421525a0
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/etched-applied-ai-engineer-silicon-engineering/

## About the role

We are using AI to build AI chips. AI agents are starting to genuinely work for verification, debug, and EDA flows — we want someone to bring that inside Etched and push past it. As an Applied AI Engineer, you will embed with our hardware teams — RTL design, verification, DFT, physical design, and silicon validation — and build the agents and tooling that multiply their output.

## 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 Python and 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
- 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
- Hands-on experience building and shipping LLM-based agents or AI tooling that real users depend on (beyond calling an API — context engineering, tool integration, orchestration, failure analysis)
- An eval-driven mindset: you measure whether AI systems actually work before scaling them
- High agency and comfort with ambiguity — you can find the problem, not just solve the stated one

Tags: ASIC