# Research Engineer, RL Frontiers at Etched

- Company: Etched
- Status: Open
- Workplace: On-site
- Location: San Jose
- Level: Mid-level
- Discipline: AI & ML
- Employment: Full-time
- Posted: 2026-10-21
- Skills: RL, ASIC, Python
- Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/etched/5e24c2af-4911-43be-b961-9396d40ad473

## Description

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 distributed-training engineer who reads the rollouts and checks the numbers before trusting a result.

 - Understand the systems side of RL well enough to make the loop faster and cheaper, not just better.

 - Are entrepreneurial and make good calls under compute and data constraints. Former founders are a plus.


STRONG CANDIDATES MAY ALSO HAVE EXPERIENCE WITH

 - RL or post-training frameworks (e.g., verl,

More Etched roles: https://deviantjobs.com/companies/etched