Applied Researcher - Chip Design

Prime Intellect is building the open superintelligence stack, including the Lab platform for post-training at frontier scale. The role focuses on agentic reinforcement learning for chip design, building agents, environments, evaluations, and post-training systems for semiconductor design and verification workflows, spanning RTL generation and debugging, formal verification, simulation, physical design, optimization, and orchestration across EDA tools.

Responsibilities

Turn workflows into tasks, environments, evaluations, and reward signals; run post-training experiments against real baselines and deploy what works; build interactive verification environments where agents use EDA tools to modify designs, debug failures, and plan multi-step work; create verifiers and rewards grounded in tests, simulation, formal methods, design rules, and engineering outcomes; run experiments on credit assignment when feedback arrives late and several tools contribute; develop evaluations for correctness, recovery, and generalization; work directly with customers, users, or research partners while maintaining a research agenda

Requirements

Depth in RL, agents, or post-training systems; ability to become fluent in semiconductor workflows; hands-on experience building and debugging model-training, post-training, agent, evaluation, or closely adjacent experimental loops; strong experimental judgment (meaningful baselines, careful trace inspection, clear failure attribution); strong Python and the ability to build artifacts that other researchers and engineers can run, inspect, and extend; comfort owning ambiguous problems and keeping partners and teammates current

Nice to have

Prior work in design automation, compilers, formal methods, or ML for systems; publications, open-source systems, benchmarks, or shipped products as evidence of exceptional work

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