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Research Engineer, RL Frontiers

Etched· Software
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San Jose$400k+Full-timePosted 4d ago

About the role

Research Engineer on the RL Frontiers team at Etched, focusing on training frontier models to automate kernel development, ASIC engineering, production pipelines, and 3-D hardware operating systems using proprietary simulators and environments.

Responsibilities

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

Qualifications

  • Hands-on post-training experience, including SFT and RL (e.g., PPO, GRPO), and have shipped models people used.
  • Took a model from bad to good on a task it wasn’t built for, ideally with scarce data, for example as an early post-training hire at an applied AI company.
  • Strong PyTorch and distributed-training engineer who reads the rollouts and checks the numbers before trusting a result.
  • Understanding of the systems side of RL to speed up and reduce cost of the loop, not just improve it.
  • Entrepreneurial mindset and ability to make good calls under compute and data constraints; former founders are a plus.

Skills

Required:Post-training RL / SFTPyTorchRL system designExperimentation & benchmarking

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)
  • Wellness benefits covering fitness, mental health, and more
  • Daily lunch and dinner in our office
  • Unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification
Last updated Oct 22, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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About Etched

Etched is building frontier inference clusters: co-designs chips, racks, software and manufacturing to push the pareto frontier for AI hardware.

frontier inference clustersAI hardwarechipsrackssoftwaremanufacturingparto frontier
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