Research Engineer, RL Frontiers

Etched·San Jose·Posted 21 October 2026

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About the role

JOB SUMMARY 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. KEY 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 YOU MAY BE A GOOD FIT IF YOU - Have hands-on post-training experience, including SFT and RL (e.g., PPO, GRPO), and have shipped models people used. - Have taken 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. - Are a strong PyTorch and…

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