{"id":2988849,"url":"https://alion.io/job/etched-research-engineer-rl-frontiers","title":"Research Engineer, RL Frontiers","company":{"id":5021,"name":"Etched","domain":"etched.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/etched","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":89,"open_postings":80,"ghost_share":0.1,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":162,"computed_at":"2026-10-22T06:10:10Z"}},"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 Jose, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":223000,"max_usd":492000,"period":"year","method":"role_country_seniority_unknown","sample_n":4194},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"GRPO","optional":false},{"name":"Post-training","optional":false},{"name":"PPO","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false},{"name":"SFT","optional":false},{"name":"Knowledge Distillation","optional":true},{"name":"Model Distillation","optional":true},{"name":"SGLang","optional":true},{"name":"vLLM","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-21T05:53:14Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-21","last_verified_at":"2026-10-22T21:06:15Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":1,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":["company_stale"],"days_open":1},"description":"Job Summary\nEtched 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.\nYou will use our proprietary simulators and environments to create custom data mixes and post-train models to SOTA performance on our hardest engineering tasks.\nKey Responsibilities\nOwn the post-training stack completely end to end.\n\nBuild RL environments with ASIC, kernel, and supercomputing engineers, rewarded by simulation, formal tools, tests, and hardware measurements.\n\nCreate custom data mixes that unlock frontier performance on relevant tasks.\n\nCreate benchmarks that drive real productivity in the models and avoid reward hacking\n\nYou may be a good fit if you\nHave hands-on post-training experience, including SFT and RL (e.g., PPO, GRPO), and have shipped models people used.\n\nHave 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.\n\nAre a strong PyTorch and distributed-training engineer who reads the rollouts and checks the numbers before trusting a result.\n\nUnderstand the systems side of RL well enough to make the loop faster and cheaper, not just better.\n\nAre entrepreneurial and make good calls under compute and data constraints. Former founders are a plus.\n\nStrong candidates may also have experience with\nRL or post-training frameworks (e.g., verl, OpenRLHF, TRL, prime-rl) or inference engines (vLLM, SGLang).\n\nAgentic, multi-turn RL with verifiable rewards.\n\nDistillation and training small, specialized models for production.\n\nASIC design or verification, accelerator kernels, or large-scale compute infrastructure.\n\nBenefits\nMedical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage\n$500 per month credit for waiving medical benefits\n\nHousing subsidy of $2,500 per month for those living within walking distance of the office\n\nRelocation support for those moving to San Jose (Santana Row)\n\nVarious wellness benefits covering fitness, mental health, and more\n\nDaily lunch and dinner in our office\n\nUnlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification\n\nBase Compensation Range\n$400K+\n\nPlus Significant Equity\n\nHow we’re different\nEtched believes in the Bitter Lesson. We are the first inference-focused frontier AI system, betting early on transformer and transformer-like architectures and on increasing model sizes. Our addressable market is the entirety of inference, unlike many of our competitors.\nWe are a fully in-person team in San Jose (Santana Row), and greatly value engineering skills. We do not have boundaries between engineering and research, and we expect all of our technical staff to contribute to both and work across disciplines as needed.\nAbout Etched\nEtched is building hardware for frontier intelligence. We co-design chips, racks, software, and manufacturing to deliver best-in-class throughput and latency across both prefill and decode workloads. Our first products are heavily focused on inference. Backed by hundreds of millions from top-tier investors and staffed by leading engineers, Etched is redefining the infrastructure layer for the fastest growing industry in history.","description_format":"text","description_chars":3331,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":true,"industries":["Processors, MCUs & AI Chips","AI Compute & Inference","AI Chips & Accelerators"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-21T09:16:57Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 5","filings_12m":5,"filings_prev_12m":0,"green_card_filings_12m":0,"median_offered_wage_usd":173500,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-15T11:24:14+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)"],"filings_for_role_12m":0}],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":1,"expected_fill_days":162,"reasons":["conf:3","velocity","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-22T06:10:10Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/etched-research-engineer-rl-frontiers","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/etched-research-engineer-rl-frontiers.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-23T00:53:52Z","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":1484,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-24T00:00:00Z"}},"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":5021},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=5021"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fetched-research-engineer-rl-frontiers"},{"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%2Fetched-research-engineer-rl-frontiers"},{"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%2Fetched-research-engineer-rl-frontiers"},{"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/etched-research-engineer-rl-frontiers\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fetched-research-engineer-rl-frontiers"}]}