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Core Engineering Intern

etched

OnSite San Jose
Uncategorized

Job Score

70 pts
On-site model (+70)

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 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.

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Tech & Remote Glossary

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🏢 Work Models & Routine

Async (Asynchronous Work)
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Sync (Synchronous Work)
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Daily / Stand-up
A quick daily meeting (usually 15 minutes) common in Agile (Scrum) methodologies. The team answers three questions: What did I do yesterday? What will I do today? Are there any blockers?
All-Hands / Town Hall
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The "robot" that reads your resume. Software like Greenhouse, Ashby, and Workday are used to filter candidates by keywords before a human even looks at the document. (Pro tip: this is why your resume must be clean, semantic, and have the right keywords).
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The document that lists the responsibilities, technical requirements, and benefits of the open position.
Cultural Fit
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Expert Tip

The Audiovisual Revolution in the Digital Age

Discover the skills, cloud tools, and strategic mindsets that tech giants, global agencies, and startups demand from video professionals in 2026.

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The fear of being replaced by AI is common, but corporate reality tells a different story: companies are actively hiring professionals who leverage AI to multiply their productivity. Tech recruiters are looking for talent who can automate tedious tasks and focus on high-level art direction.

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In the audiovisual universe, your text-based resume matters far less than your Showreel. However, the most common mistake is creating a Reel filled only with pretty pictures and upbeat music, devoid of context.

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4. Soft Skills and B2B Dynamics

Video editors and motion designers often work in silos, but in modern tech companies, they are fully immersed in agile methodologies (Scrum/Kanban). You will need to interact daily with Copywriters, Product Managers, and Growth Analysts.

Knowing how to receive critical feedback without taking it personally, understanding the difference between a "technical revision" and a "strategic revision," and communicating rendering deadlines clearly are the soft skills that guarantee your retention in high-paying remote roles.

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