Research Engineer, Reinforcement Learning Frontiers

Job overview

The Research Engineer, Reinforcement Learning Frontiers role is fully in person in San Jose, CA. Base compensation is $400,000 or more, plus significant equity. Etched builds hardware for frontier intelligence, including chips, racks, and software focused on inference. The engineer develops and post-trains frontier models for demanding engineering tasks, helping automate kernel development, ASIC engineering, production pipelines, and 3-D hardware operating systems. The work combines research and engineering to improve model performance and practical productivity under compute and data constraints.

What you'll do

• Own the post-training stack end to end
• build reinforcement-learning environments with ASIC, kernel, and supercomputing engineers using simulation, formal tools, tests, and hardware measurements
• create custom data mixes for frontier performance
• develop benchmarks that drive model productivity and avoid reward hacking.

What we're looking for

Skills & competencies

research engineer

reinforcement learning

san jose ca

etched

frontier ai

post-training

pytorch

distributed training

asic engineering

kernel development

$400k+

significant equity

Work arrangement

• Weekend coverage required

Benefits & perks

• Medical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage
• $500 monthly credit for waiving medical benefits
• $2,500 monthly housing subsidy for eligible employees living within walking distance
• relocation support, wellness benefits, daily lunch and dinner, and compute budget subject to ROI justification.

Why this role

The team is fully in person in San Jose and expects technical staff to contribute across research and engineering. Benefits include medical, dental, and vision coverage, housing subsidy for eligible nearby residents, relocation support, wellness benefits, daily office meals, and compute budget subject to ROI justification.

About the employer

Etched is hiring for this role. Industry: Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing, Web Hosting, and Related Services. Sector: 51.