Research Engineer, RL Frontiers

Etched is building AI systems that accelerate its own development. As a Research Engineer on the RL Frontiers team, you will train our proprietary frontier models to automate kernel development, ASIC engineering, production pipelines, and 3-D hardware operating systems. You will use our proprietary simulators and environments to create custom data mixes and post-train models to SOTA performance on our hardest engineering tasks.

Responsibilities

Own the post-training stack 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 having 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 make the loop faster and cheaper; Entrepreneurial, with good judgment under compute and data constraints

Nice to have

Experience with 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; Former founders

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 the office; Unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification; Significant equity