Core Engineering Intern

Etched is building hardware and infrastructure for frontier intelligence, co-designing chips, racks, software, and manufacturing for high-throughput, low-latency inference. The Core Engineering Intern will work on the special projects team to identify critical gaps, build production-level solutions from 0 to 1, and own a real project addressing time-sensitive, business-critical challenges across engineering and research.

What you'll do:

• 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
• You will own a real project, scoped to land in production and shape how Etched executes
• You can read it, modify it, debug it, and direct AI to write it well
• You ship things that work
• You measure whether AI systems work, identify where they fall short, and know how to hillclimb
• You find the real problem to solve
• 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

What they're looking for:

• 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
• 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

Benefits:

• Generous housing support for those relocating
• Daily lunch and dinner in our office
• Direct mentorship from industry leaders and world-class engineers
• Opportunity to work on one of the most important problems of our time