Internal Acceleration, Research Engineer - San Jose, United States
$150,000 - $400,000 USD yearly
Originally posted 15 October 2026 by the employer.
About the role
This role involves building new agentic harnesses and operating systems to transform how hardware is built in an AI native world, working directly with founders and product teams.
What you'll do
- Embed with kernels, ASIC, hardware, and production teams to identify and address high-leverage bottlenecks.
- Build and deploy LLM agents wired into engineering workflows via tool-calling and MCP.
- Create execution environments where agents can verify their 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 evals and track adoption to iterate on tools.
- Take on special projects directly with the 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 like distributed systems, experiment infrastructure, or developer tooling.
- Experience using coding agents, analyzing their transcripts, and modifying the system when an agent provides incorrect output.
- High agency in unfamiliar domains to find and solve problems.
- Product sense, design taste, and attention to detail.
Skills: LLM agents, engineering workflows, execution environments, EDA flows, full-stack internal products
This role has been open 0 days — well below the 50-day median for Infrastructure/Platform Software roles.
Infrastructure/Platform Software · Infrastructure Platform
|
Open roles in category
973
|
Median days open
50 d
|
Median salary
$235k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Etched | All employers we track in this specialty (973 roles · 85 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 11 | 973 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 43 | 6127 · 145 employers |
| Median days open | 8 d | 50 d (−42 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $235k |
Skills observed across this category: LLM agents, engineering workflows, execution environments, EDA flows, full-stack internal products
Who's hiring in this category
- NVIDIA · 289 open roles · median 44 d
- Qualcomm · 61 open roles · median 57 d
- AMD · 57 open roles · median 21 d
- Graphcore · 44 open roles · median 90 d
- Intel Corporation · 40 open roles · median 9 d
- Cerebras · 39 open roles · median 80 d
How we counted: 973 open Infrastructure/Platform Software (Infrastructure Platform) roles from 85 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 15 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.