Research Engineer, Agentic EDA

Normal is an applied AI company solving the hardest problems in AI and silicon. We build foundational hardware and software for the semiconductor industry critical AI infrastructure and the broader systems that power our world in partnership with the worlds most advanced institutions. We work as one team across New York City Silicon Valley (Mountain View) London Copenhagen and Seoul.

Your Role in Our Mission

Were hiring a Research Engineer to push the frontier of agentic LLMs and reinforcement learning for pushing the capabilities of Normal EDA our agentic AI platform for semiconductor design automation. Youll design and run experiments build agents curate datasets from complex technical artifacts and create rigorous evaluations. Youll write productionquality research code and work closely with engineering to ship improvements to customers.

Responsibilities

• Build multi-agent systems for code generation that interact with EDA tools (e.g. simulations waveform analysis formal tools physical design tools) propose fixes and iterate through all stages of chip design and verification flows.

• Build research prototypes that integrate with our production agentic code generation tool; collaborate to productionize wins.

• Create RL environments and evaluations for agents explore proxy rewards and consider speed/accuracy tradeoffs of custom tools.

• Generate datasets from silicon collateral (e.g. RTL testbenches custom VIPs) sources such as RTL designs/VIPs/chip specifications/agent logs; generate synthetic data where appropriate; maintain data cards and licensing.

• Analyze experiments with disciplined ablations; document results and drive progress with technical rigour.

• Stay current on LLM agents RL (offline/online RLHF/RLAIF) constrained decoding and program synthesis.

What Makes You a Great Fit

• PhD in CS/AI/ML (or equivalent research experience) with publications ideally in multiagent RL agentic AI or RL for language/code.

• Strong Python and ML framework experience (PyTorch preferred; JAX/HF a plus).

• Demonstrated ability to turn research into working systems

• Experience designing evaluation environments and reward models for sequential/agentic tasks.

• Experience and fluency with EDA tools (formal simulation physical design).

• Comfortable with data acquisition/curation; good instincts about data quality and licenses.

• Clear communicator who partners well with other engineers.

Bonus Points

• Research on program synthesis/codegen constrained decoding or executionbased rewards.

• Experience with offline RL from tool traces or human corrections.

• Opensource contributions (e.g. SkyRL verl RLlib Transformers Pytorch).

• Familiarity with semiconductor/chip domains or other complex technical domains.

• Track record of shipping research to production.

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

Normal Computing is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race color religion sex sexual orientation gender identity national origin disability veteran status or any other legally protected status.

Accessibility Accommodations

Normal Computing is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability please let us know at

Privacy Notice

By submitting your application you agree that Normal Computing may collect use and store your personal information for employment-related purposes in accordance with our Privacy Policy.

Required Experience:

Unclear Seniority