Hiring: Applied AI Engineer, Kernel Performance Company: Etched Location: San Jose, CA Job Posted Time: 2026-09-10 13:19:14 Target Skills & Keywords : Fine-tuning, LLM, Python, RAG About the job Required Skills: •Every model release presents a new opportunity to push the frontier on kernel engineering. Future performance breakthroughs will come from AI systems that can understand model architectures and hardware, run thousands of experiments, learn from profiler feedback, and discover the most performant implementations faster than the best engineers. •Etched offers a uniquely tight research loop: proprietary hardware, runtime, kernels, production workloads, and dedicated in-office compute under one roof. You will teach models using proprietary performance signals, iterate on their proposals, and make every experiment improve both the performance optimization system and the hardware it runs on. •Own the system that turns new model architectures into verified, production-ready kernels and model mappings. •Build agents that understand Etched hardware, design experiments, generate implementations, profile them, diagnose bottlenecks, and iterate with our teams, to the limits of model autonomy. •Design evals covering correctness, numerical stability, latency and efficiency. •Turn profiler traces, simulation, hardware counters, and expert judgment into structured signals models can learn from. •Curate proprietary datasets and optimization memory from complete trajectories, expert demonstrations, counterexamples, and production outcomes. •Build fast, reproducible experiment infrastructure and observability so experiments remain interpretable, trustworthy, and high-throughput. Compensation: •$150,000 - $225,000 / year •Medical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage Interested candidates, please apply directly through the job posting on company's career page or try via AI auto apply on this platform. Don't miss this opportunity to join a forward-thinking team!