Internal Acceleration, Research Engineer (Kernels)
$150k - $400k • San Jose • FullTime
Posted 2d ago
Job Location
San Jose
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Employment Type
FullTime
Categories
AI Research Engineer
About the job
Our Internal Acceleration team is building agents to accelerate the production of frontier tokens. You will work directly with founders and embed with our kernels team to develop new agentic harnesses and operating systems, transforming hardware development in an AI-native world. This role focuses on harnesses, tool use, context, memory, execution environments, and evaluations that enable agents to perform long-running, useful engineering work. We seek engineers who thrive in ambiguity, possess strong product sense, and are eager to own problems end-to-end, understanding that this is a time-sensitive and business-critical role that may not adhere to a 9-5 schedule.
Responsibilities
- Embed with the kernels team to identify high-leverage bottlenecks and own them from concept to production-ready tools.
- Build and deploy LLM agents integrated into engineering workflows using tool-calling and MCP.
- Develop execution environments for agents to self-verify work, with sandboxed access to simulators, EDA flows, compilers, profilers, and hardware.
- Ship full-stack internal products from inception, including interfaces, data pipelines, and infrastructure.
- Design evaluations and track adoption to measure effectiveness and prioritize tools.
- Undertake special projects with founders, identifying company-wide problems and driving them to critical milestones.
Requirements
- 1-5+ years of experience building and shipping software end-to-end, preferably at a fast-moving startup.
- Experience building agents for complex, multi-step tasks beyond simple API calls, including tool design, long-context management, evaluations, and failure analysis.
- Strong software engineering skills with experience building reliable systems like distributed systems, experiment infrastructure, or developer tooling.
- Proficiency in using coding agents, analyzing their transcripts, and improving systems when agents err.
- High agency in unfamiliar domains, with the ability to identify and drive solutions for real problems.
- Demonstrated product sense, design taste, and extreme attention to detail.
- Exposure to chip development, kernels, hardware, or manufacturing is a plus.
- Experience in infrastructure, data engineering, or DevOps is a plus.
- Experience with fine-tuning, RAG over proprietary technical data, or multi-agent orchestration is a plus.
- Startup experience, particularly during hypergrowth, is a plus.
Benefits
- Medical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage
- $500 per month credit for waiving medical benefits
- Housing subsidy of $2,500 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 and dinner in our office
- Unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification
- Significant Equity