Performance Tools Intern - San Jose, United States
Originally posted 3 August 2026 by the employer.
About the role
This role involves designing and developing a sophisticated performance analysis tool tailored for Etched's custom ML accelerators, enabling ML engineers and customers to understand workload behavior, identify bottlenecks, and unlock the hardware's full potential.
What you'll do
- Build components of performance analysis and profiling infrastructure.
- Collect and analyze performance data from custom ML accelerators, including hardware counters, execution traces, and memory behavior.
- Develop tooling to trace host-side runtime activity, system behavior, and accelerator execution.
- Help correlate performance events across CPUs, accelerators, storage, networking, and distributed workloads.
- Build analysis and visualization tools that help engineers identify performance bottlenecks and optimize models.
- Work alongside hardware, compiler, firmware, and inference engineers to understand performance challenges and develop tools that improve developer productivity.
What you'll need
- Strong programming skills in C++ or Rust.
- Solid understanding of computer architecture, including CPUs, GPUs or AI accelerators, memory hierarchies, and parallel programming.
- Experience or strong interest in low-level performance analysis, profiling, and performance optimization.
- Familiarity with performance analysis tools such as Nsight, VTune, Xprof, Perfetto, or similar tools.
- Experience or strong interest in operating systems, compilers, firmware, drivers, or other low-level systems software.
Nice to have
- Direct experience developing performance analysis or debugging tools.
- Experience with ML accelerator architectures (GPUs, TPUs, etc.).
- Experience with kernel-mode driver development (Linux or Windows).
Skills: performance analysis, profiling, C++, Rust, computer architecture, ML accelerators
This role has been open 76 days — well above the 51-day median for Infrastructure/Platform Software roles.
Infrastructure/Platform Software · Infrastructure Platform
|
Open roles in category
962
|
Median days open
51 d
|
Median salary
$236k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Etched | All employers we track in this specialty (962 roles · 86 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 8 | 962 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 42 | 6118 · 145 employers |
| Median days open | 44 d | 51 d (−7 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $236k |
Skills observed across this category: performance analysis, profiling, C++, Rust, computer architecture, ML accelerators
Who's hiring in this category
- NVIDIA · 274 open roles · median 47 d
- Qualcomm · 62 open roles · median 53 d
- AMD · 54 open roles · median 19 d
- Graphcore · 44 open roles · median 93 d
- Intel Corporation · 43 open roles · median 12 d
- Cerebras · 36 open roles · median 83 d
How we counted: 962 open Infrastructure/Platform Software (Infrastructure Platform) roles from 86 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 18 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.