Inference Software Engineer
- Salary
- $175K - $400K
- Level
- Mid
- Work type
- On-site · San Jose
Not stated in the posting: visa.
Open. First seen 2 October 2026.
About the role
Etched's standard text
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.
Key responsibilities
- Support porting state-of-the-art models to our architecture. Help build programming abstractions and testing capabilities to rapidly iterate on model porting.
- Build, enhance, and scale our runtime, including multi-node inference, intra-node execution, state management, and robust error handling.
- Optimize routing and communication layers using our collectives.
- Utilize performance profiling and debugging tools to identify bottlenecks and correctness issues.
You may be a good fit if you have
- Proficiency in C++ or Rust.
- Understanding of performance-sensitive or complex distributed software systems like Linux internals, accelerator architectures (e.g. GPUs, TPUs), Compilers, or high-speed interconnects (e.g. NVLink, InfiniBand).
- Familiarity with PyTorch or JAX.
- Ported applications to non-standard accelerator hardware or hardware platforms.
Strong candidates may also have experience with (Nice-to-have qualifications)
- Developed low-latency, high-performance applications using both kernel-level and user-space networking stacks.
- Deep understanding of distributed systems concepts, algorithms, and challenges, including consensus protocols, consistency models, and communication patterns.
- Solid grasp of Transformer architectures, particularly Mixture-of-Experts (MoE).
- Built applications with extensive SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) optimizations for performance-critical paths.
Benefits
- Medical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage
- $500 per month credit for waiving medical benefits
- Housing subsidy of $2.5k per month for those living within walking distance of the office
- Relocation support for those moving to San Jose (Santana Row)
- Various wellness benefits covering fitness, mental health, and more
- Daily lunch + dinner in our office
- Unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification
How we’re different
Etched's standard text
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.
What this role asks for
76% of this description is written for the role. The rest is Etched's standard text, folded away below.
Read against Etched's other open postings on this site.
The team: Architecture
This role is one of 6 open in Architecture.
WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS
C++ (2 of 6), Rust (2 of 6)
OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM
- Substrate IC Package Layout Design Engineer posted Sep 17
- Advanced Packaging SI/PI Engineer posted Aug 27
- Substrate IC Package Layout Design Engineer posted Aug 27
- Performance Modeling Engineer posted Apr 21
- ASIC Architect posted Aug 5
From the team and dates on Etched's own job board.
See Software Engineer salaries in the United States →
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