Research Engineer, RL Frontiers

The role

You will train proprietary frontier models to automate kernel development, ASIC engineering, production pipelines, and 3-D hardware operating systems. You will use proprietary simulators and environments to create custom data mixes and post-train models.

What you will do

• Own the post-training stack completely end to end.
• Build RL environments with ASIC, kernel, and supercomputing engineers.
• Create custom data mixes that unlock frontier performance on relevant tasks.
• Create benchmarks that drive real productivity in the models and avoid reward hacking.

Required qualifications

• Hands-on post-training experience, including SFT and RL (e.g., PPO, GRPO).
• Experience shipping models people used.
• Experience taking a model from bad to good on a task it wasn't built for, ideally with scarce data.
• Strong PyTorch and distributed-training engineer.
• Understand the systems side of RL to make the loop faster and cheaper.
• Entrepreneurial and make good calls under compute and data constraints.

Nice to have

• Former founders
• RL or post-training frameworks (e.g., verl, OpenRLHF, TRL, prime-rl) or inference engines (vLLM, SGLang)
• Agentic, multi-turn RL with verifiable rewards
• Distillation and training small, specialized models for production
• ASIC design or verification, accelerator kernels, or large-scale compute infrastructure

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

About the company

Etched is building hardware for frontier intelligence by co-designing chips, racks, software, and manufacturing. They are an inference-focused frontier AI system building the infrastructure layer for the industry.