{"id":789402,"url":"https://alion.io/job/bronco-founding-ai-engineer","title":"Founding AI Engineer","company":{"id":670477,"name":"Bronco AI","domain":"bronco.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/bronco-2","size_band":"1-10","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Rippling","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":3,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-31T05:58:55Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":null,"employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":166000,"max_usd":370000,"period":"year","method":"role_country_seniority_unknown","sample_n":4425},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"DPO","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Evaluation","optional":false},{"name":"Post-training","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Reward Modeling","optional":false},{"name":"RLAIF","optional":false},{"name":"RLHF","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2024-08-06T21:35:53Z","employer_posted_date":"2024-08-06","last_verified_at":"2026-11-01T00:24:32Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":816,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":815},"description":"About Us\nThe future will have more chips, in more varieties, for more applications than ever before. The current way of designing, testing, and manufacturing them can't keep up. Outdated chip development processes are the present rate limiter on humanity's future.\nBronco's mission is to keep Moore's law going by building AI agents that automate large swaths of repetitive chip verification and design.\nWe're backed by tier-1 Silicon Valley investors and deployed with some of the largest chip companies in the world, supporting production SoC designs at leading-edge process nodes.\n About the Role\nAs a Founding AI Engineer, you will own the core intelligence of Bronco's agents. That means designing the training pipelines, reward models, and evaluation harnesses that will make sure our agents actually succeed not just in benchmarks but on real production tapes.\nThe ideal candidate has built and shipped agentic AI systems as a founder, as a founding engineer, or as part of an industry research lab. You are high agency, know how to attack a problem, and can build the infrastructure to systematically make your systems better.\nWhat You'll Do\nDesign and implement post-training pipelines for domain-specific model behavior across DV tasks - testbench generation, bug triage, coverage closure\nDevelop reinforcement learning setups, including reward modeling and RLHF/RLAIF pipelines, to improve agent decision-making on long-horizon verification tasks\nBuild tool interfaces, scaffolding, and execution harnesses that allow models to interact reliably with EDA environments and RTL artifacts\nIterate with silicon domain experts and customers to encode verification knowledge into training data, reward signals, and evals that measure real agent capability - not proxy metrics\nStay current with frontier research in LLM reasoning, RL for agents, and tool use - and bring what's relevant into production\nWe'd Like to See\nYou have shipped agentic AI systems that work in the real world\nExperience at an industry research lab, as a past founder, or as a founding engineer at an AI startup\nDeep hands-on experience with post-training: RLHF, DPO, or equivalent\nExperience designing evaluation frameworks for LLM or agentic systems\nStrong proficiency in Python and PyTorch\nWe'd Prefer If You Had\nBackground in Electrical or Computer Engineering\nFamiliarity with chip design and verification workflows\nExperience with EDA tools (Synopsys, Cadence, Questa, etc.)\nPublications at NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, DAC, ICCAD, or DVCon\nWhat We Offer\nCompetitive salary and equity package\nComprehensive benefits including health, vision, dental, housing stipend, and 401(k) with match\nHigh-ownership, high-velocity environment with rapid learning opportunities\nA technical problem that is the present rate limiter on the 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