{"id":3444665,"url":"https://alion.io/job/collinear-mts-research-kernels-hardware-rl","title":"MTS - Research (Kernels & Hardware RL)","company":{"id":673970,"name":"Collinear","domain":"collinear.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/collinear","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":4,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-11-02T06:13:15Z"}},"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":["Sunnyvale, United States","San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":160000,"max":400000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":400000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"CUDA","optional":false},{"name":"CUTLASS","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"LLVM","optional":false},{"name":"MLIR","optional":false},{"name":"Post-training","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Triton","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-29T04:40:33Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-29","last_verified_at":"2026-11-02T12:37:06Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":4,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":4},"description":"About Collinear\nAt Collinear, we help teams fearlessly ship AI.\nAbout the Role\nWe are looking for an MTS - Research (Kernels & Hardware RL) team member to help us build the data engine for frontier AI. You will develop high-fidelity reinforcement learning environments and evaluation stacks that teach advanced agents to write efficient GPU kernels and solve hardware optimization problems. You will own environments end to end, from selecting meaningful tasks and reference implementations to building reliable scoring and preventing reward hacking.\nResponsibilities:\nBuild Agentic Environments: Design diverse, executable tasks for GPU and accelerator kernels, low-level systems programming, and hardware-aware optimization. Extend into FPGA, RTL, or simulation workflows where your expertise can create meaningful challenges.\n\nProgrammatic and Agentic Verification: Build reproducible correctness tests and performance graders, benchmark against trusted implementations, and harden execution sandboxes against timing exploits, test leakage, and reward hacking.\n\nClose the Loop: Analyze agent trajectories and failure modes, curate high-signal tasks and data, and collaborate on post-training experiments that improve real capability across unseen workloads and hardware constraints.\n\nCollaborate: Work daily with the founders and research staff to shape the roadmap and push the state-of-the-art in AI reliability.\n\nScale the Infrastructure: Build reliable compilation, execution, profiling, and evaluation pipelines that support repeated experiments across hardware targets.\n\nAbout You\nWe are looking for individuals who demonstrate a rare combination of technical depth, research intuition, and high agency.\nTechnical Foundation: A Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in CS, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or a related technical field, or demonstrated proof of work through significant open-source contributions or industry experience.\n\nEngineering Rigor: Strong C/C++ and CUDA or a comparable kernel language, alongside production-quality Python. You have built and profiled kernels and understand memory hierarchy, data movement, parallelism, occupancy, and numerical correctness.\n\nML Fluency: Hands-on experience with LLMs and a principled understanding of how they are evaluated and optimized. You can translate a systems problem into an executable task with clear feedback.\n\nEmpirical Mindset: Experience conducting reproducible performance experiments, inspecting profiler results, and distinguishing real improvements from measurement noise or benchmark shortcuts.\n\nWhat will make you stand out\nResearch Taste: You have a strong intuition for identifying what matters in complex problem spaces. You can balance deep research exploration with the pragmatism needed to ship a product.\n\nImpact-Driven Agency: You care about outcomes, not just activity. You don't wait for a ticket; you identify gaps in the system, build the solution, and ensure it moves real-world metrics for frontier AI labs.\n\nDomain Expertise: Depth in Triton, CUTLASS, LLVM/MLIR, GPU architectures, vector ISAs, FPGA/HLS, RTL/HDL, EDA tools, or architecture simulators. Experience building RL environments, agent harnesses, or robust evaluation infrastructure.\n\nProven Track Record: A history of shipping high-performance kernels, compiler or hardware tooling, influential systems or ML research, or high-impact open-source projects.\n\nPost-Training Experience: Experience fine-tuning or evaluating large-scale models to deliver \"frontier performance\" on open-source benchmarks.\n\nWhy Join Collinear\nOwn the Frontier: Work on the most pressing problem in AI today: making agents reliable enough for production.\n\nHigh Density of Talent: Join a small, elite team where you will be pushed to do your life's work.\n\nElite Compensation: We offer competitive salary and equity packages to ensure we attract the best of the best.\n\nDirect Impact: At a seed-backed startup, your work directly shapes the company's trajectory and the future of AI safety.\n\nCollinear is an equal opportunity employer and values diversity. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.\nThe base salary range for this role in California is $160,000 to $400,000 per year, depending on experience, skills, and qualifications. This role will also be eligible for equity, benefits, and bonuses.\nCollinear provides reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities throughout the application and hiring process. If you need an accommodation, please contact us.\nPursuant to applicable local ordinances, we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.","description_format":"text","description_chars":4790,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["AI Training Data & Annotation"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-29T07:03:36Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 4","filings_12m":4,"filings_prev_12m":2,"green_card_filings_12m":0,"median_offered_wage_usd":152500,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-29T16:27:21+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)"],"filings_for_role_12m":2}],"liveness":{"score":86,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.86,"p_room":1,"age_days":4,"expected_fill_days":30,"reasons":["conf:2","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-11-02T06:13:15Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":400000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/collinear-mts-research-kernels-hardware-rl","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/collinear-mts-research-kernels-hardware-rl.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-02T14:50:41Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":20507,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-03T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":673970},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=673970"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fcollinear-mts-research-kernels-hardware-rl"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fcollinear-mts-research-kernels-hardware-rl"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fcollinear-mts-research-kernels-hardware-rl"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/collinear-mts-research-kernels-hardware-rl\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fcollinear-mts-research-kernels-hardware-rl"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":3444665}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"collinear.ai","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":3444665},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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