Internal Acceleration, Research Engineer (ASIC) - San Jose, United States
$150,000 - $400,000 USD yearly
Originally posted 15 October 2026 by the employer.
Develop agentic harnesses and operating systems to transform hardware building in an AI native world.
About the role
What you'll do
- Embed with the ASIC team to identify bottlenecks and develop tools from inception to daily use by engineers.
- Build and deploy LLM agents integrated into engineering workflows via tool-calling and MCP.
- Create execution environments allowing agents to verify their own work, with sandboxed access to simulators, EDA flows, compilers, profilers, and real hardware.
- Ship full-stack internal products from zero to one, including interfaces, data pipelines, and infrastructure.
- Design evaluations and track adoption to prioritize effective tools.
- Take on special projects with founders to achieve critical milestones.
What you'll need
- 1-5+ years of experience building and shipping software end to end.
- Experience building agents for complex, multi-step tasks, including tool design, long-context management, evals, and failure analysis.
- Strong software engineering skills in building reliable systems such as distributed systems, experiment infrastructure, or developer tooling.
- Experience using coding agents, reading their transcripts, and modifying systems when agents are incorrect.
- High agency in unfamiliar domains, identifying and driving solutions to problems.
- Product sense, design taste, and attention to detail.
Skills: LLM agents, engineering workflows, EDA flows, compilers, simulators
This role has been open 0 days — well below the 46-day median for Software Engineering Semiconductor roles.
Software Engineering Semiconductor · AI EDA Design
|
Open roles in category
107
|
Median days open
46 d
|
Median salary
$180k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Etched | All employers we track in this specialty (107 roles · 31 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 6 | 107 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 42 | 6157 · 145 employers |
| Median days open | 0 d | 46 d (−46 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $180k |
Skills observed across this category: LLM agents, engineering workflows, EDA flows, compilers, simulators
Who's hiring in this category
- Applied Materials · 14 open roles · median 55 d
- KLA Corporation · 13 open roles · median 28 d
- Micron Technology · 13 open roles · median 36 d
- Lam Research · 8 open roles · median 20 d
- Cadence Design Systems · 7 open roles · median 18 d
- NVIDIA · 7 open roles · median 162 d
How we counted: 107 open Software Engineering Semiconductor (AI EDA Design) roles from 31 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 16 Oct 2026. Specialty figures count only roles carrying this exact specialty label, so an employer's related work in neighbouring specialties is not included there — it is counted in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family row. Figures refresh nightly.