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.

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, 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.
• Daily lunch and dinner in our office

BASE COMPENSATION RANGE

• Plus Significant Equity