Internal Acceleration, Research Engineer (Hardware) - San Jose, United States
$150,000 - $400,000 USD yearly
Originally posted 15 October 2026 by the employer.
About the role
What you'll do
- Embed with the hardware team to identify and address high-leverage bottlenecks, owning solutions from conception to daily use.
- Build and deploy LLM agents integrated into engineering workflows through tool-calling and MCP.
- Create execution environments that enable agents to verify their own work, with sandboxed access to simulators, EDA flows, compilers, profilers, and real hardware.
- Ship full-stack internal products, including interfaces, data pipelines, and infrastructure for Etched's development.
- Design evaluations and track adoption to prioritize effective tools and discontinue ineffective ones.
- Undertake special projects directly with founders to address company-wide problems and achieve critical milestones.
What you'll need
- At least 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, evaluations, and failure analysis.
- Strong software engineering skills in building reliable systems, such as distributed systems, experiment infrastructure, or developer tooling.
- Experience using coding agents heavily, analyzing their transcripts, and modifying the system when agents are incorrect.
- High agency in unfamiliar domains, identifying problems and driving solutions forward.
- Product sense, design taste, and extreme 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.