IA Research Engineer (Kernels) Intern

Etched is hiring an IA Research Engineer (Kernels) Intern in San Jose, United States. Level rates it ; you can apply on Etched.

Level's read on this job

On Level's scale, this role is Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
Tools and skills the posting cites include RAG, AI agents and fine tuning.
Level classifies it as an internship.
Level lists 119 other open roles at Etched.
The role was posted in the last few days.

AI in this role

ragai-agentsfine-tuning

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

We are seeking talented Spring ‘27 and Summer ‘27 IA Research Engineer (Kernels) interns to build the agents that accelerate how Etched produces frontier tokens. You will embed with our kernels team and work alongside our founders on agentic harnesses, tools, and evals that let agents do long-running engineering work people actually rely on. This role is for builders who thrive on ambiguity, have real product sense, and want to own problems end to end.

Key responsibilities

Embed with our kernels team to find high-leverage bottlenecks and help turn them into tools engineers use every day.
Build and deploy LLM agents wired into our engineering workflows via tool-calling and MCP.
Help build execution environments where agents can verify their own work, with sandboxed access to simulators, compilers, profilers, and real hardware.
Ship internal products end to end, including the interfaces, data pipelines, and infrastructure behind them.
Design evals and track adoption to measure which tools are working and which aren’t.
Support special projects with the founders across the company.

You may be a good fit if you have

Progress towards a Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD degree in computer science, computer engineering, or a related field
Strong software engineering fundamentals and a record of shipping projects other people use
Built agents for multi-step tasks beyond calling an API: tool design, context management, evals, and failure analysis
Heavy use of coding agents, including reading their transcripts and changing the system when an agent is confidently wrong
High agency in unfamiliar domains, product sense, and extreme attention to detail

Strong candidates may have some experience with

Chip development, GPU kernels, hardware, or manufacturing
Infrastructure, data engineering, or DevOps
Fine-tuning, RAG over technical data, or multi-agent orchestration
Hackathons, startups, or side projects with real users

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

Program details

12-week paid internship
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

For any questions, contact internships@etched.com.

How we’re different

Etched believes in the Bitter Lesson. We are the first inference-focused frontier AI system. 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.

How we rate this

IA Research Engineer (Kernels) Intern at Etched rates 96 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.

●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Key facts

IA Research Engineer (Kernels) Intern is an open job at Etched.
Level rates this role AI Level 4 of 4: Builds AI.
The role is based in San Jose.
The job was posted on November 4, 2026.
Seniority: intern.
Applications are handled by Etched. Apply on Etched

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

RAGAI agentsFine-tuning

Questions you could be asked

How would you design a retrieval step so the model answers from real data instead of guessing?
How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
Walk me through fine-tuning a model: what data did you use, and how did you check the result?
How would you decide a model or AI system is ready to ship?
Tell me about a time a model underperformed in production. How did you find out, and what did you change?

Adapt your resume

List these exact terms on your resume: RAG, AI agents, and Fine-tuning. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.

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