Applied AI Engineer - Hardware - San Jose, United States

Originally posted 24 September 2026 by the employer.

Etched is building hardware for frontier intelligence, with a focus on inference workloads.

About the role

This role involves building AI systems that transform engineering requirements into verified electrical and mechanical designs for frontier AI hardware, specifically focusing on inference.

What you'll do

• Build and own AI systems that convert engineering requirements into verified electrical and mechanical designs.
• Create agents that operate CAD, EDA, and simulation tools to generate designs, run experiments, and iterate with engineering teams.
• Develop workflows covering component selection, schematic capture, PCB layout, mechanical CAD, thermal analysis, and electrical and structural simulation.
• Build tool integrations and representations for agents to reason about geometry, connectivity, materials, tolerances, and coupled electrical, mechanical, thermal, and manufacturing constraints.
• Design evaluations that measure engineering correctness, constraint satisfaction, simulation accuracy, manufacturability, and performance.
• Curate proprietary datasets and design memory from complete trajectories, expert demonstrations, failed approaches, and manufactured outcomes.

What you'll need

• Proven ability to solve complex problems across different technical domains.
• Hands-on experience building and shipping LLM-based agents or AI tooling, including context engineering, tool integration, orchestration, evaluation, and failure analysis.
• Strong software engineering skills, particularly in Python, for building reliable integrations with complex engineering tools and debugging systems.
• Interest, experience, or academic exposure to electrical or mechanical engineering.
• Fluency using AI for learning and problem-solving, including agentic coding tools, deep research, and frontier models.
• An eval-driven mindset to measure AI system effectiveness, investigate failures, and drive improvements.

Nice to have

• Automating CAD or EDA tools through APIs, scripting, plugins, or GUI interaction.
• Experience with schematic design, PCB layout, component selection, power delivery, or signal and power integrity.
• Experience with parametric CAD, mechanical assemblies, tolerance analysis, thermal management, CFD, or FEA.
• Experience with design optimization, constraint solving, or search over large engineering design spaces.
• Experience fine-tuning or post-training models using tool-use trajectories, simulation feedback, or expert demonstrations.
• Experience with multimodal reasoning over engineering drawings, schematics, geometry, and simulation results.
• Understanding of hardware fabrication, assembly, bring-up, and testing, and where simulation and physical behavior diverge.

Skills: AI systems, engineering requirements, electrical and mechanical designs, CAD, EDA, simulation tools, PCB layout