Core Engineering Intern
etched
Job Score
70 ptsAbout 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 prefill and decode. Backed by hundreds of millions from top-tier investors and staffed by leading engineers, we're redefining the infrastructure layer for the fastest growing industry in history.
Job Summary
Core Engineering is our special projects team. This team identifies critical gaps across Etched and builds solutions 0 to 1, often in days, with immediate feedback loops. You might build internal tools to unblock a hardware team, prototype systems for manufacturing execution, or design, evaluate, and deploy agentic systems for our most challenging R&D problems.
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 exceptional full-stack engineering capabilities, 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. This is not a shadowing program. You will own a real project, scoped to land in production and shape how Etched executes.
You may be a good fit if you:
Have a track record of solving hard problems across stacks and domains — you enjoy being dropped into unfamiliar territory and figuring it out
Have something you built that you can walk us through in depth. Depth in one thing beats a list of ten
Are comfortable with Python and TypeScript: you can read it, modify it, debug it, and direct AI to write it well. We don't care whether you write code from scratch, but we do care whether you ship things that work
Have product sense and its necessary prerequisites, from AI tooling proficiency to design taste
Bias towards action and comfort with incomplete information
Strong candidates may also have:
Data engineering, infrastructure or DevOps experience, and deploying operational systems in enterprise environments
Experience wielding frontier models on frontier problems: an eval-driven mindset — you measure whether AI systems work, identify where they fall short, and know how to hillclimb
High agency and comfort with ambiguity — you find the real problem to solve
Prior startup experience, especially during hyper growth
We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every qualification
Program details
12-week paid internship (June - August 2026)
Generous housing support for those relocating
Daily lunch and dinner in our office
Based at our office in San Jose, CA
Direct mentorship from industry leaders and world-class engineers
Opportunity to work on one of the most important problems of our time
For any questions, contact internships@etched.com
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.
We are a fully in-person team in San Jose and Taipei, 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.
Discover Other Areas
Understand the scope of work, key skills, and tools used in different career areas.
About Customer Success
Customer Success is the area responsible for ensuring clients achieve their goals when using the product or service. It is a strategic function for retention, expansion, and customer satisfaction.
Key skills include account management, churn analysis, NPS, onboarding, upsell, and cross-sell. Knowledge of CS tools like Gainsight, Totango, and ChurnZero is a differentiator.
CS is becoming increasingly strategic in SaaS companies, with professionals directly contributing to recurring revenue growth (MRR/ARR).
About Cloud Solutions
The Cloud Solutions area is responsible for designing, implementing, and managing cloud infrastructure and services (AWS, Azure, GCP) for companies. Cloud professionals architect scalable, secure, and cost-optimized solutions, from data center migrations to serverless and multi-cloud architectures.
Key skills include IaC (Terraform, CloudFormation), containers (Docker, Kubernetes), serverless (Lambda, Cloud Functions), managed databases (RDS, DynamoDB, BigQuery), cloud networking (VPC, CDN, load balancer), and security (IAM, WAF, KMS). Knowledge of FinOps, cloud governance, and AWS/Azure/GCP certifications is a differentiator.
Cloud Solutions professionals in technology companies are highly valued, especially those who master multi-cloud architectures, FinOps, and can optimize costs while maintaining performance and security. The field offers opportunities from cloud engineer to cloud solutions architect, head of cloud, and chief cloud architect.
About Human Resources
The Human Resources area is responsible for all people management in organizations, from attracting and selecting talent to developing, retaining, and ensuring employee well-being. HR professionals are fundamental to building strong organizational cultures and engagement.
Key skills include recruitment and selection, compensation and benefits management, learning and development (L&D), organizational climate, employee engagement, labor law, labor relations, and HR tools (Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, Bamboo HR). Knowledge of people analytics and data-driven HR is a differentiator.
HR professionals in technology companies are highly valued, especially those who master employer branding, people analytics, and talent retention strategies. The field offers opportunities from HR analyst to Chief People Officer, with a focus on culture, engagement, and people growth.
About Automation Engineer
The Automation Engineer is the professional responsible for designing, developing, and implementing solutions that automate manual and repetitive processes in IT, infrastructure, testing, and operations. They combine programming knowledge with DevOps and SRE vision to eliminate manual tasks and increase operational efficiency.
Key skills include Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible, Pulumi), CI/CD (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI), test automation (Selenium, Cypress, Playwright), network automation (Netconf, SDN), RPA (UiPath, Power Automate), and scripting (Python, Bash, PowerShell). Knowledge of Kubernetes, GitOps (ArgoCD, Flux), and automation platforms is a differentiator.
Automation Engineers in technology companies are highly valued, especially those who can create automated deployment pipelines, self-healing infrastructure, and internal developer platforms (IDP). The field offers opportunities from junior automation engineer to automation architect and head of automation.
About Talent Acquisition
Talent Acquisition is the strategic area responsible for attracting, selecting, and hiring the best professionals for the organization. Unlike traditional recruitment, TA acts as a strategic business partner, aligning talent acquisition with the company's long-term objectives.
Key skills include advanced sourcing, employer branding, labor market analysis, talent pipeline management, and candidate experience. Tools like LinkedIn Recruiter, ATS (Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby), and assessment platforms are essential.
TA professionals in technology companies are highly valued, especially those who master tech sourcing, workforce planning, and recruitment metrics like time-to-hire and cost-per-hire.
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