> AI agents: this is one page of Nextmove’s FDE site, in Markdown. Nextmove is a job board and free career service for forward deployed engineers (FDEs). Each posting is classified from its text, not its title: the kind of work, how much of it is production code, pre-sales weight, time at customer sites, travel, remote arrangement, level and posted base pay. The site also publishes the aggregates: median pay by level, metro, company and kind of work, and which companies started hiring FDEs each week. Every page under https://nextmove.md/fde is served this way; the index of pages is https://nextmove.md/llms.txt.

# Internal Acceleration, Engineer (Production)

Canonical URL: https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/50520a6cf33f35c2

Etched posts a FDE role to build for teams inside the company in San Jose, CA, at $150,000–$400,000 base, above the senior FDE median of $190,000 across 1,864 postings with pay. Identify production bottlenecks and own solutions from concept through daily adoption Read from the employer’s posting on November 8, 2026.

- [Etched](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/etched)

Posted Oct 15, 2026 by Etched · open on Ashby as of Nov 8, 2026

**$150,000–$400,000** + equity San Jose, CA On-site Full-time

Identify production bottlenecks and own solutions from concept through daily adoption

- [See roles that fit me](https://nextmove.md/sign-up?from=%2Ffde%2Fjobs%2F50520a6cf33f35c2&placement=top)
- [View posting at Etched](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Etched/778a762d-4a30-4a8b-aad9-ee18855ce75c/application)

Free. Upload your resume once, see why each FDE role fits, and get introduced only when you say so.

## At a glance

### Posted base pay

$150K–$400K Above the median

Midpoint $275K · median $190K

This job $150K to $400K. Senior FDE postings, 1,864 postings: the middle 50% of posted pay is $160K to $220K, median $190K.

### The work

Builds for teams inside the company

Balance **Mostly building**

Project stages

1. Pre-sales (not covered)
2. Proof of concept (not covered)
3. Implementation
4. Operations

- **Coding**: Writes production code

- **Builds for**: Internal teams

- **Level**: Senior

- **Role**: Individual contributor

### What they ask for

Experience

- **1+ years** software development and shipping end to end
- **5+ years** software development and shipping end to end *Preferred*

Background

- **Software engineering**

### Do you meet what the posting states?

The posting asks for 1+ years. How many do you have?

The posting reads as a senior role. What level are you at now?

The job is in San Jose, CA. Could you work there?

Which of these have you used in production?

Answer each one. Nothing is saved or sent.

[What postings ask for, by background →](https://nextmove.md/fde/paths)

## Conditions

- **Location**: San Jose, CA

- **Work arrangement**: On-site

- **Employment type**: Full-time

- **Pay**:

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- [Other jobs at Etched (2)](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/etched)

## The job description from Etched

Posted by Etched on Oct 15, 2026

### Job Summary

Our Internal Acceleration team’s mandate is to build agents to accelerate the production of frontier tokens.

You’ll work directly with our founders and embed with our production team to build new agentic harnesses and operating systems to transform the way hardware is built in an AI native world. Your work will vary widely, and your success is measured by how much faster Etched moves, not by the lines of code you write.

This role is for engineers who thrive on ambiguity, have real product sense, and want to own problems end to end. It’s a whiteboard for future founders. The problems we solve are time-sensitive and business-critical. This role will not be a 9-5, and the ideal candidate is excited about that.

### You may be a good fit if you

- Have at least 1-5+ years of experience building and shipping software end to end, ideally at a fast-moving startup
- Have strong full-stack skills. We care less about whether you write every line yourself and more about whether what you ship works
- Have built LLM agents or AI tooling that real users depend on, which means more than calling an API: context engineering, tool integration, evals, and failure analysis
- Use AI to ramp fast on unfamiliar domains. Agentic coding tools and frontier models are how you work, not an add-on
- Have product sense, design taste, and extreme attention to detail
- Have extreme agency: you find the real problem, not just the stated one

### Key Responsibilities

- Embed with our production team to find the highest-leverage bottlenecks, and own each one from first idea to a tool engineers rely on every day.
- Build and deploy LLM agents wired into our engineering workflows via tool-calling and MCP.
- Ship full-stack internal products from zero to one: the interfaces, data pipelines, and infrastructure that define how Etched builds.
- Measure what works. Design evals and track adoption so we double down on the tools that matter and kill the ones that don’t.
- Take on special projects directly with the founders, surfacing problems across the company and doing whatever it takes to hit critical milestones.

### Strong candidates may also have

- Exposure to chip development, kernels, hardware, or manufacturing.
- Infrastructure, data engineering, or DevOps experience
- Fine-tuning, RAG over proprietary technical data, or multi-agent orchestration
- Startup experience, especially through hypergrowth

### 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

### Base Compensation Range

- $150K – $400K+
- Plus Significant Equity

### How we’re different

Etched believes in the Bitter Lesson. We are the first inference-focused frontier AI system, betting early on transformer and transformer-like architectures and on increasing model sizes. 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.

### 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.

[View posting at Etched](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Etched/778a762d-4a30-4a8b-aad9-ee18855ce75c/application)

## About Etched

Purpose-built transformer ASICs for inference; 10x performance vs B200 at lower cost. Sohu targets hyperscalers' trillion-parameter deployments.

Series B · 100–200 people

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- [Compare senior FDE salary ranges](https://nextmove.md/fde/salary/senior)
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