Core Software Engineer

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

Build the products that will power a majority of the world’s inference. The Core Engineering team is our special forces. This role works directly with our founders to identify critical gaps across the organization and build solutions 0 to 1, often in days not weeks, with immediate feedback loops. Your projects will vary widely: one week you might build internal infrastructure to unblock a hardware team, the next you might prototype a deployment for a customer or stand up a new tooling workflow.

This role is for engineers who thrive on ambiguity, move fast without sacrificing quality, and get energy from solving whatever problem matters most right now. It is a whiteboard for future founders – if you’re interested in shipping 0-1 production-level code every week, this role is for you.

This role requires not only exceptional full-stack engineering capabilities, but also deep product sense, personal accountability, and a knack for building from the ground up. At Etched, we’re developing our processes for scale, and we’re looking for engineers to deploy to our toughest challenges. The problems we solve are time-sensitive and business-critical. This role will not be a 9-5, and the ideal candidate is excited about that.

Key Responsibilities

• Detect problems and inefficiencies across the organization, bringing them to the attention of the executive team, and develop custom applications and projects for each need. The ideal candidate should be comfortable shipping from scratch every week.
• Work cross-functionally to execute special projects between the executive team and the rest of the organization.
• Define and represent operational milestones by collecting company data, developing business intuitions, and executing whatever needs to be done to meet them.
• Design the interfaces, developer workflows, and critical infrastructure that will define the company’s technical foundation.

You may be a good fit if you

• Strong full-stack skills (TypeScript, React, Python).
• 1-5 years of experience building and shipping software end to end, ideally in a startup environment.
• Product sense and its necessary prerequisites, from AI tooling proficiency to design taste.
• Bias towards action and comfort with incomplete information.
• Ability to continuously learn, set metrics, and solve problems with minimal supervision and maximum impact.
• Excitement for solving technical problems with data structures, storage systems, cloud infrastructure, front-end frameworks, and other technical tools.

Strong Candidates May Also Have Experience With

• Infrastructure or DevOps experience
• Prior startup experience, especially during hyper growth
• Deploying AI systems in enterprise environments

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage
• $500 per month credit for waiving medical benefits
• Housing subsidy of $2k per month for those living within walking distance of the office
• Relocation support for those moving to San Jose (Santana Row)
• Various wellness benefits covering fitness, mental health, and more
• Daily lunch + dinner in our office
• Unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification

How We’re Different

Etched believes in the Bitter Lesson. We are the first inference-focused frontier AI system, betting early on transformer and transformer-like architectures and on increasing model sizes. 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.

Compensation Range: $150K - $275K