Research Engineer, RL Frontiers
From $400k • San Jose • FullTime
Posted 1d ago
Job Location
San Jose
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Employment Type
FullTime
Categories
AI Research Engineer
About the job
Etched is building AI systems that accelerate its own development. As a Research Engineer on the RL Frontiers team, 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 to SOTA performance on the company's hardest engineering tasks. The company is focused on inference and bets on transformer architectures, aiming to capture the entire inference market. Etched is a fully in-person team in San Jose, valuing engineering skills and expecting technical staff to contribute to both engineering and research across disciplines.
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.
Requirements
- Hands-on post-training experience, including SFT and RL (e.g., PPO, GRPO), and have shipped 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 engineering skills.
- Understanding of the systems side of RL to improve loop speed and cost.
- Entrepreneurial mindset with the ability to make good decisions under compute and data constraints.
- Experience with RL or post-training frameworks (e.g., verl, OpenRLHF, TRL, prime-rl) or inference engines (vLLM, SGLang).
- Experience with agentic, multi-turn RL with verifiable rewards.
- Experience with distillation and training small, specialized models for production.
- Experience with 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
- Significant Equity