Applied Researcher - Chip Design

The role

You will build agents, environments, evaluations, and post-training systems for semiconductor design and verification workflows. This involves working with RTL generation, formal verification, simulation, physical design, and EDA tool orchestration.

What you will do

• Build interactive verification environments for agents to write or repair RTL and invoke tools
• Design rewards and evaluations combining functional correctness with efficiency and constraints
• Train long-horizon agents to recover from design and tool failures
• Own interactive environments where agents use EDA tools to modify designs and debug failures
• Develop verifiers and rewards grounded in tests, simulation, and formal methods
• Conduct experiments on credit assignment
• Create evaluations for correctness, recovery, and generalization
• Work directly with customers, users, or research partners

Required qualifications

• Depth in RL, agents, or post-training systems
• Hands-on experience building and debugging model-training, post-training, agent, evaluation, or closely adjacent experimental loops
• Strong experimental judgment
• Strong Python
• Ability to build artifacts that other researchers and engineers can run, inspect, and extend
• Comfort owning ambiguous problems

Nice to have

• Prior work in design automation, compilers, formal methods, or ML for systems

Benefits

• Cash Compensation Range of $150-300k + equity incentives
• Flexible Work (San Francisco, New York, London, or remote)
• Visa Sponsorship & relocation support
• Professional Development budget
• Team Off-sites & conference attendance

About the company

Prime Intellect is building the open superintelligence stack, providing infrastructure for frontier AI labs. Their platform, Lab, unifies compute, environments, evaluations, and deployment into one full-stack system.