Supercomputing Engineer

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.

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.

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  Architect and implement low-level control-plane software responsible for system bring-up, configuration, and management of cluster-scale AI compute deployments

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  Build system services that interact directly with hardware, firmware, and the operating system

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  Develop telemetry, logging, and tracing infrastructure for diagnosing failures and driving performance improvements

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  Implement orchestration primitives for managing devices, nodes, and racks

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  Profile and tune performance across PCIe, memory, networking, kernel, and runtime layers

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  Collaborate closely with hardware, firmware, kernel, and runtime teams to co-design system interfaces and behavior
  

• 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
  

• 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

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, 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.