Etched.ai is an AI infrastructure company building rack-scale and frontier inference systems.
About Etched Etched is building hardware for frontier intelligence. We co-design chips, racks, software, and manufacturing to deliver best-in-class throughput and latency across both prefill and decode workloads. Our first products are heavily focused on inference. Backed by hundreds of millions from top-tier investors and staffed by leading engineers, Etched is redefining the infrastructure layer for the fastest growing industry in history. Job Summary Etched is building at-scale AI systems that will unlock faster, more efficient inference for billions of people, and the Supercomputing team is critical in enabling this mission. We are seeking a highly skilled and motivated Engineer to join our Supercomputing team to help build the foundational software that powers our cluster-scale AI compute deployments. This role on the core team involves the development, integration, and debugging of critical system components, including on control-plane software, system bring-up, telemetry, orchestration primitives, and performance tuning at the hardware–software boundary. Key Responsibilities - Architect and implement low-level control-plane software responsible for system bring-up, configuration, and management of cluster-scale AI compute deployments - Build system services that interact directly with hardware, firmware, and the operating system - Develop telemetry, logging, and tracing infrastructure for diagnosing failures and driving performance improvements - Implement orchestration primitives for managing devices, nodes, and racks - Profile and tune performance across PCIe, memory, networking, kernel, and runtime layers - Collaborate closely with hardware, firmware, kernel, and runtime teams to co-design system interfaces and behavior You may be a good fit if you have - Strong proficiency in C/C++ or Rust for low-level systems programming - Deep understanding of Linux internals, kernel/user-space boundaries, and system-level debugging - Experience working close to hardware: drivers, DMA, interrupts, memory management, or device control paths - Strong debugging skills using logs, tracing, and low-level observability tools - Strong communication skills and comfort collaborating across hardware and software teams Strong candidates may also have experience with (Nice-to-have qualifications) - Experience with data center orchestration technologies such as Kubernetes and Docker - Experience with kernel development, device drivers, or firmware-adjacent software - Familiarity with PCIe, NUMA, networking, or high-speed interconnects - Experience with tracing and profiling tools such as perf, eBPF, ftrace, or custom instrumentation - Experience taking complex systems from early bring-up through stable operation - Background in HPC, AI infrastructure, or large-scale compute systems - Experience designing system test harnesses and failure-injection frameworks - Familiarity with Kubernetes or cluster orchestration at the node or control-plane level Benefits - Medical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage - $500 per month credit for waiving medical benefits - Housing subsidy of $2k per month for those living within walking distance of the office - Relocation support for those moving to San Jose (Santana Row) - Various wellness benefits covering fitness, mental health, and more - Daily lunch + dinner in our office - Unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification How we’re different Etched believes in the Bitter Lesson http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html. We are the first inference-focused frontier AI system, betting early on transformer and transformer-like architectures and on increasing model sizes. Our addressable market is the entirety of inference, unlike many of our competitors. We are a fully in-person team in San Jose (Santana Row), and greatly value engineering skills. We do not have boundaries between engineering and research, and we expect all of our technical staff to contribute to both and work across disciplines as needed.