What are the responsibilities and job description for the Software Intern position at Etched?
Software Intern
Location: San Jose, CA
Team: Software
About Etched
Etched is building the world’s first AI inference system purpose-built for transformers - delivering over 10x higher performance and dramatically lower cost and latency than a B200. With Etched ASICs, you can build products that would be impossible with GPUs, like real-time video generation models and extremely deep & parallel chain-of-thought reasoning agents. 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
We are seeking highly motivated Software interns to join our team. We are hiring software interns across four tracks (systems, firmware, infrastructure, and chip simulation/tooling) and you may choose to focus on one based on your background and interests. You do not need experience in all tracks. Strength in one area is sufficient.
Our systems software role focuses on the design, development, and deployment of all software required for building, configuring, updating, monitoring, and maintaining rack scale systems. Your work can involve network performance, creation and processing of telemetry pipelines to analyze system-level health and performance, deploying and provisioning software, validating hardware, and keeping the systems and pipelines for all of the above secure and performant. Additionally, we are responsible for our customers’ experience, both directly and via existing systems for managing data centers of compute and inference servers.
In our firmware role, you will help develop firmware for custom ASICs designed to run large transformer models efficiently. You’ll work across the stack—from low-level drivers, hardware interfaces, and system initialization code to integration with runtime libraries and model-execution frameworks. Your work will focus on making the hardware operate reliably and at peak performance, enabling high-throughput inference and training workloads. You’ll collaborate with hardware, architecture, and software teams to bring up new silicon, validate features, and support real-world AI applications.
Our infrastructure and core software roles drive the development and adoption of next-generation infrastructure tooling, enabling Etched ASIC, Software, and Platform engineers to iterate faster, build more reliably, and push the boundaries of AI performance. This includes working on our hybrid-cloud high-performance compute (HPC) clusters, massively parallel CI executions, Infrastructure-as-code, scale-out observability platform with LLM integration, and building high-quality tools that engineers love using.
Our chip simulation and tooling role will co-design, develop, and test simulations of our custom hardware and tools that engineers use to analyse those systems. You will be working at the cutting edge of hardware innovation, closely coordinating with both software and hardware teams across their whole development path.
These roles demand a strong software engineering mindset, quality instincts, and deep understanding of systems.
You May Be a Good Fit If You Have
Program Details
How We’re Different
Etched believes in the Bitter Lesson. We think most of the progress in the AI field has come from using more FLOPs to train and run models, and the best way to get more FLOPs is to build model-specific hardware. Larger and larger training runs encourage companies to consolidate around fewer model architectures, which creates a market for single-model ASICs.
We are a fully in-person team in West San Jose, 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 as needed.
Location: San Jose, CA
Team: Software
About Etched
Etched is building the world’s first AI inference system purpose-built for transformers - delivering over 10x higher performance and dramatically lower cost and latency than a B200. With Etched ASICs, you can build products that would be impossible with GPUs, like real-time video generation models and extremely deep & parallel chain-of-thought reasoning agents. 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
We are seeking highly motivated Software interns to join our team. We are hiring software interns across four tracks (systems, firmware, infrastructure, and chip simulation/tooling) and you may choose to focus on one based on your background and interests. You do not need experience in all tracks. Strength in one area is sufficient.
Our systems software role focuses on the design, development, and deployment of all software required for building, configuring, updating, monitoring, and maintaining rack scale systems. Your work can involve network performance, creation and processing of telemetry pipelines to analyze system-level health and performance, deploying and provisioning software, validating hardware, and keeping the systems and pipelines for all of the above secure and performant. Additionally, we are responsible for our customers’ experience, both directly and via existing systems for managing data centers of compute and inference servers.
In our firmware role, you will help develop firmware for custom ASICs designed to run large transformer models efficiently. You’ll work across the stack—from low-level drivers, hardware interfaces, and system initialization code to integration with runtime libraries and model-execution frameworks. Your work will focus on making the hardware operate reliably and at peak performance, enabling high-throughput inference and training workloads. You’ll collaborate with hardware, architecture, and software teams to bring up new silicon, validate features, and support real-world AI applications.
Our infrastructure and core software roles drive the development and adoption of next-generation infrastructure tooling, enabling Etched ASIC, Software, and Platform engineers to iterate faster, build more reliably, and push the boundaries of AI performance. This includes working on our hybrid-cloud high-performance compute (HPC) clusters, massively parallel CI executions, Infrastructure-as-code, scale-out observability platform with LLM integration, and building high-quality tools that engineers love using.
Our chip simulation and tooling role will co-design, develop, and test simulations of our custom hardware and tools that engineers use to analyse those systems. You will be working at the cutting edge of hardware innovation, closely coordinating with both software and hardware teams across their whole development path.
These roles demand a strong software engineering mindset, quality instincts, and deep understanding of systems.
You May Be a Good Fit If You Have
- Progress towards a Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
- Proficiency in C/C or Rust
- Proficiency in Python (for interns interested in systems software)
- Strong fundamentals in data structures and algorithms
- Strong understanding of low-level software engineering
- Strong understanding of hardware/software co-design
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills
- Strong candidates may also have:
- Experience with Linux internals, kernel development, or driver debugging
- Experience with hardware diagnostics or interpreting hardware logs
- Exposure to server virtualization or CI/CD pipelines
- Experience with Rust or embedded development
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 think most of the progress in the AI field has come from using more FLOPs to train and run models, and the best way to get more FLOPs is to build model-specific hardware. Larger and larger training runs encourage companies to consolidate around fewer model architectures, which creates a market for single-model ASICs.
We are a fully in-person team in West San Jose, 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 as needed.