# Research Engineer, RL Frontiers at Etched

- Company: Etched
- What the company does: Co-designed chips, racks, and software to push the pareto frontier to best-in-class throughput and interactivity. Backed by Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia.
- Company website: https://www.etched.com/
- Type: Startups
- Level: Mid level
- Location: San Jose
- Work setup: On-site
- Posted: 2026-10-21
- Apply by: 2026-12-05
- Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Etched/5e24c2af-4911-43be-b961-9396d40ad473?utm_source=1752vc&utm_medium=careers
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/etched-research-engineer-rl-frontiers/

## About the role

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. Found on 1752vc Careers, the job board for startup and VC roles.

## What they're looking for

- 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

Tags: Software

Source: 1752vc Careers, https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/etched-research-engineer-rl-frontiers/