Core Engineering Intern

Job Summary

Core Engineering is our special projects team. This team identifies critical gaps across Etched and builds solutions 0 to 1, often in days, with immediate feedback loops. You might build internal tools to unblock a hardware team, prototype systems for manufacturing execution, or design, evaluate, and deploy agentic systems for our most challenging R&D problems.

This role is for engineers who thrive on ambiguity, move fast without sacrificing quality, and get energy from solving whatever problem matters most right now. It is a whiteboard for future founders - if you're interested in shipping 0-1 production-level code every week, this role is for you.

This role requires exceptional full-stack engineering capabilities, deep product sense, personal accountability, and a knack for building from the ground up. At Etched, we're developing our processes for scale, and we're looking for engineers to deploy to our toughest challenges. The problems we solve are time-sensitive and business-critical. This role will not be a 9-5, and the ideal candidate is excited about that. This is not a shadowing program. You will own a real project, scoped to land in production and shape how Etched executes.

You may be a good fit if you

• Have a track record of solving hard problems across stacks and domains - you enjoy being dropped into unfamiliar territory and figuring it out
• Have something you built that you can walk us through in depth. Depth in one thing beats a list of ten
• Are comfortable with Python and TypeScript: you can read it, modify it, debug it, and direct AI to write it well. We don't care whether you write code from scratch, but we do care whether you ship things that work
• Have product sense and its necessary prerequisites, from AI tooling proficiency to design taste
• Bias towards action and comfort with incomplete information

Strong candidates may also have

• Data engineering, infrastructure or DevOps experience, and deploying operational systems in enterprise environments
• Experience wielding frontier models on frontier problems: an eval-driven mindset - you measure whether AI systems work, identify where they fall short, and know how to hillclimb
• High agency and comfort with ambiguity - you find the real problem to solve
• Prior startup experience, especially during hyper growth

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every qualification

Program details

• 12-week paid internship (June - August 2026)
• Generous housing support for those relocating
• Daily lunch and dinner in our office
• Based at our office in San Jose, CA
• Direct mentorship from industry leaders and world-class engineers
• Opportunity to work on one of the most important problems of our time

How we're different

Etched believes in the Bitter Lesson 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.

We are a fully in-person team in San Jose and Taipei, 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.