Etched is hiring an Applied AI Engineer for Hardware in San Jose to build autonomous systems that handle electrical and mechanical designs. This position suits software professionals with experience in building LLM agents who want to automate complex hardware development workflows.
Role Overview
Etched is building specialized hardware for frontier artificial intelligence, focusing heavily on inference workloads. The company operates a physical office in San Jose where software engineers, hardware designers, and manufacturing teams work together under one roof. The Applied AI Engineer for Hardware will create autonomous agents capable of taking hardware concepts from initial requirements through verified manufacturing outputs. By bridging software engineering and physical hardware design, the role aims to accelerate development cycles and improve throughput.
Key Responsibilities
Build and own AI systems that turn engineering requirements into verified electrical and mechanical designs, carrying intent and constraints from initial concepts through manufacturing outputs.
Build agents that operate CAD, EDA, and simulation tools to generate designs, run experiments, inspect results, diagnose problems, and iterate with teams, to the limits of model autonomy.
Develop workflows spanning component selection, schematic capture, PCB layout, mechanical CAD, assemblies, thermal analysis, and electrical and structural simulation.
Build tool integrations and representations agents need to reason about geometry, connectivity, materials, tolerances, and coupled constraints.
Design evals that measure engineering correctness, constraint satisfaction, simulation accuracy, manufacturability, and performance on real design tasks.
Turn simulation outputs, design-rule checks, engineering reviews, and physical measurements into structured feedback models can learn from.
Curate proprietary datasets and design memory from complete trajectories, expert demonstrations, failed approaches, and manufactured outcomes.
Build reproducible experiment infrastructure so design revisions, tool actions, simulation settings, and results remain traceable and experiments run at scale.
Ship agent-generated designs with electrical, mechanical, and manufacturing teams, quantifying improvements in cycle time, hardware performance, and engineering effort.
Continuously evaluate new model releases and deploy the best models and methods for each stage of the design loop.
Requirements
Track record of solving hard problems across stacks and domains, with a willingness to learn unfamiliar territory.
Hands-on experience building and shipping LLM-based agents or AI tooling, covering context engineering, tool integration, orchestration, evaluation, and failure analysis.
Strong software engineering skills, particularly in Python, with the ability to build reliable integrations with complex engineering tools and direct AI to write code.
Interest, experience, or academic exposure to electrical or mechanical engineering, or a record of learning technical domains deeply enough to build tools for practitioners.
Fluency using AI to learn and ramp on new problems through agentic coding tools, deep research, and frontier models.
Eval-driven mindset focused on measuring system performance, investigating failures, and improving models.
Comfort moving between research exploration, agentic experimentation, engineering-tool debugging, and production execution.
Nice to Have
High agency and comfort with ambiguity.
Experience automating CAD or EDA tools through APIs, scripting, plugins, or GUI interaction.
Knowledge of schematic design, PCB layout, component selection, power delivery, or signal and power integrity.
Familiarity with parametric CAD, mechanical assemblies, tolerance analysis, thermal management, CFD, or FEA.
Background in design optimization, constraint solving, or search over large engineering design spaces.
Experience fine-tuning or post-training models using tool-use trajectories, simulation feedback, or expert demonstrations.
Multimodal reasoning over engineering drawings, schematics, geometry, and simulation results.
Experience taking hardware through fabrication, assembly, bring-up, and testing.
Skills and Tools
Python
LLMs and AI Agents
CAD and EDA tools
Simulation and thermal analysis software
PCB layout and schematic tools
Salary and Benefits
Base compensation range from $150,000 to $250,000 plus significant equity.
Medical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage and a $500 monthly credit for waiving medical benefits.
Housing subsidy of $2,500 per month for those living within walking distance of the office.
Relocation support for those moving to San Jose.
Various wellness benefits covering fitness and mental health.
Daily lunch and dinner provided in the office.
Unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification.
About the Company
Etched designs hardware for frontier intelligence, co-designing chips, racks, software, and manufacturing to deliver high throughput and latency performance across prefill and decode workloads. Backed by major investors, the company operates a fully in-person team in San Jose where researchers and engineers collaborate across traditional discipline boundaries.
How to Apply
Candidates should visit the official Etched careers page to submit their application for this position.
