Job Description

Founding AI Engineer (Agentic AI Reinforcement Learning)

Stealth AI Startup AI for Semiconductor Engineering

San Francisco Onsite

$180k $250k base 0.40.75% equity

Early Team Real Production Customers

This isnt another LLM wrapper job.

Were working with a stealth AI startup building agentic AI systems that automate complex chip verification and debugging workflows.

Today debugging a single issue in chip verification can take days and multiple engineers digging through tools logs and simulation environments.

This company is building AI agents that reduce those workflows to minutes.

The platform captures how the best silicon engineers solve problems and turns that knowledge into AI playbooks that scale across entire engineering teams.

Customers already include fast-moving semiconductor startups and large publicly traded chip companies.

Theyre now hiring a Founding AI Engineer to help build the core intelligence layer powering these agents.

This is a true 0 1 role where youll design systems ship production models and directly shape the future of AI in hardware engineering.

What Youll Own

Build the Intelligence Layer

Design and implement post-training pipelines that shape how AI agents reason about chip verification workflows.

Reinforcement Learning Systems

Develop reward models RLHF / RLAIF pipelines and evaluation harnesses that improve agent decision-making over time.

Agent Tooling & Execution Systems

Build the infrastructure that allows models to interact with real engineering environments and EDA tools.

Production AI Systems

Ship agentic AI systems used directly by semiconductor engineers solving real verification challenges.

Customer-Driven Intelligence

Work closely with silicon engineers and customers to encode domain knowledge into training data reward signals and evaluation frameworks.

Frontier AI Work

Stay close to advances in LLM reasoning agentic architectures and reinforcement learning bringing new ideas directly into production.

What Theyre Looking For

Production AI Builders

3 years building and shipping real AI systems ideally agent-based or complex ML systems in production.

Strong ML Engineering

Hands-on experience with Python PyTorch and modern ML workflows.

Post-Training / RL Experience

Experience with RLHF DPO reward modeling or similar post-training techniques is a strong plus.

Startup or Founder DNA

Former founders founding engineers or builders who have shipped technically complex products.

Technical Depth

Strong background in computer science computer engineering or electrical engineering (top university backgrounds preferred).

Bonus Experience

Nice-to-have but not required:

• Silicon verification workflows

• EDA tooling (Synopsys Cadence Questa)

• Publications in top conferences (NeurIPS ICLR DAC)

Why This Role Is Interesting

Hard Problems Real Impact

Your work will reduce multi-day chip debugging workflows into minutes using AI agents.

Rare AI Hardware Intersection

Work at the frontier of agentic AI applied to one of the most complex engineering domains in the world.

True Founding Role

Own the core intelligence layer of the product and help shape the direction of the company.

Production from Day One

Your systems will be used by real semiconductor teams solving real problems.

Competitive Compensation

$175k $250k base meaningful founding equity (0.40.75%).

Ideal Background

You might be a strong fit if you have:

• Built agentic AI systems from scratch

• Designed RLHF / evaluation pipelines

• Shipped technically complex production AI systems

• Previously worked at a startup research lab or as a founder

• Enjoy building messy ambitious systems from zero to one

Location

San Francisco (Onsite)

H1B transfers supported for strong candidates.

If you want to work on frontier AI systems solving real engineering problems this is one of the most technically interesting roles in the market right now.