Applied AI Engineer Kernel Performance
Etched is an AI-hardware company building rack-scale frontier inference clusters.
Funding history
About Etched
Etched co-designs chips, racks, software, and manufacturing systems for efficient inference of frontier AI models, targeting throughput, latency, cost, and power efficiency across prefill and decode workloads.
Skills
Candidate Availability
Required and preferred rules are kept separate and reflect the wording in the original posting.
About the Role
You will build autonomous AI systems that turn new model architectures into verified, production-ready kernels and model mappings. You will create agents to design and run experiments, generate and profile implementations, diagnose bottlenecks, and iterate. You will develop evaluations, curate learning signals and datasets, build reproducible experiment infrastructure, and deploy measured performance improvements.
Requirements
- Python
- Low-level programming
- Kernel engineering
- AI coding tools
- LLM agents
- Context engineering
- Tool integration
- Orchestration
- Failure analysis
- Evaluation
- Fine-tuning
- Post-training
- RAG
- Multi-agent orchestration
- Accelerator performance
Responsibilities
- Own systems that convert new model architectures into verified, production-ready kernels and model mappings
- Build agents that understand hardware, design experiments, generate implementations, profile them, diagnose bottlenecks, and iterate
- Design evaluations for correctness, numerical stability, latency, and efficiency
- Turn profiler traces, simulation, hardware counters, and expert judgment into structured learning signals
- Curate proprietary datasets and optimization memory
- Build reproducible experiment infrastructure and observability
- Ship model-generated production improvements and measure end-to-end performance impact
- Partner with architecture teams on abstractions and the hardware-software roadmap
- Evaluate and deploy models for optimization-loop stages
Benefits
- Medical, dental, and vision coverage
- USD 500 monthly credit for waiving medical benefits
- USD 2,500 monthly housing subsidy for employees living within walking distance of the office
- Relocation support to San Jose
- Wellness benefits
- Daily lunch and dinner
- Unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification
- Equity
