Architecture Intern, Etched
Inference
5 days a week in office (San Jose, CA)
Designing specialised chips for language model inference
Be an early applicant
Designing specialised chips for language model inference
21-100 employees
Be an early applicant
5 days a week in office (San Jose, CA)
21-100 employees
Company mission
To create the world’s most powerful servers for transformer inference.
Role
Who you are
- Progress towards a Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD degree in computer science, computer engineering, applied mathematics, or a related field
- Proficiency in Python, C++
- Understanding of performance-sensitive or complex distributed software systems, e.g. Linux internals, accelerator architectures (e.g. GPUs, TPUs), Compilers, or high-speed interconnects (e.g. NVLink, InfiniBand)
- Ported applications to non-standard accelerator hardware or hardware platforms
- Deep knowledge of transformer model architectures and/or inference serving stacks (vLLM, SGLang, etc.)
- Proficiency in Rust
- 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
- Familiarity with PyTorch or JAX
- Math competitions (AIME, AMC, etc)
- We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every qualification
What the job involves
- Team: Architecture
- We are seeking a talented Architecture intern to join our team and contribute to the design of next-generation AI accelerators
- This role focuses on developing and optimizing compute architectures that deliver exceptional performance and efficiency for transformer workloads
- You will work on cutting-edge architectural problems and performance modeling over the course of your internship
- Support porting state-of-the-art models to our architecture. Help build programming abstractions and testing capabilities to rapidly iterate on model porting
- Assist in building, enhancing, and scaling Sohu’s runtime, including multi-node inference, intra-node execution, state management, and robust error handling
- Contribute to optimizing routing and communication layers using Sohu’s collectives
- Utilize performance profiling and debugging tools to identify bottlenecks and correctness issues
- Develop and leverage a deep understanding of Sohu to co-design both HW instructions and model architecture operations to maximize model performance
- Implement high-performance software components for the Model Toolkit
- 12-week paid internship (June - August 2026)
Our take
With AI developing rapidly, the chips that power them are doing so too. The computing requirements of technologies such as Chat GPT will increasingly require customised, hard-wired chips called ASICS, designed specially for the execution of AI models. Whilst GPUs are currently used for AI computing, Etched is making a bet on AI-hardwired chips becoming the predominant powering force of AI.
It’s a gamble, the founders themselves know that if transformers become obsolete, so will their AI-powering product. The SOHU chip that Etched builds differs from GPUs in that it has the AI architecture etched into the chip itself. General Processing Units are “general” and costly, so Etched is betting on specialised transformers taking their place in the near future.
Investors are drawn to Etched’s boldness. The 2022-founded company achieved $120 million in Series A funding just two years into its life, and received a further $500 million at the start of 2026. Etched plans to use this to amp up its competition with GPU company Nvidia, and claims to be 20 times faster than the latter’s AI-powered general processor - and significantly less costly too. Time will tell if Etched’s exciting and potentially revolutionary bet on tailored AI chips and transformers pays off.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (last 2 of 3 rounds)
Jan 2026
$500m
LATE VC
Jun 2024
$120m
SERIES A
Total funding: $625.4m
Company benefits
- Competitive Salary and Equity - We offer a competitive salary and equity package that aligns with industry standards
- Benefits - Your wellbeing is important to us. We offer unlimited PTO, life insurance, and a 401(k)
- Full Insurance Coverage - Our insurance includes full medical, dental, and vision with 100% of premium covered
Company HQ
Horace Mann and SJSU, San Jose, CA
Leadership
Robert Wachen
(Co-Founder & President)Also the Co-Founder of Prod and Mentor Labs, Birthday Cakes 4 Free Maryland and Generate Sales Online.
Gavin Uberti
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously Software Engineer at OctoML, Algorithms and BAckend Engineer at Coursedog and was a Software Engineer Intern at Xnor.ai.
Chris Zhu
(Co-Founder)Was a Teaching Fellow at Harvard and a Software Engineering Intern at Amazon and AvantStay. Was an Analyst at Harvard Undergraduate Capital Partners.
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