Applied Researcher - Chip Design

Prime Intellect; Oregon; Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible work location

Visa sponsorship & relocation support

Professional development budget

Team off-sites & conference attendance

Job summary

Prime Intellect is building the open frontier AI stack, enabling a new class of autonomous, research-driven workflows for chip design and verification. You will develop interactive environments, evaluators, and long-horizon agents that operate with EDA toolchains and real design data.

We value publications and open‑source work; expect to collaborate with customers and researchers while driving practical, battle-tested systems for post-training AI in semiconductor workflows.

Qualifications

• Depth in RL, agents, or post-training systems.
• Experience in design automation, compilers, formal methods or ML for systems is useful but not required.
• Hands-on experience building and debugging model-training, post-training, agent, evaluation loops.

Responsibilities

• Own interactive environments where agents use EDA tools to modify designs, debug failures, and plan multi-step work.
• Design verifiers and rewards grounded in tests, simulation, formal methods, design rules, and engineering outcomes.
• Run experiments on credit assignment when feedback arrives late and multiple tools contribute.

Skills

RL research

Agent development

Post-training systems

Python

Experimental judgement

Model debugging

Job description

Own Your Intelligence

Prime Intellect is building the open superintelligence stack: the infrastructure frontier AI labs build internally, made available to every ambitious AI team. Our platform, Lab, unifies compute, environments, evaluations, secure sandboxes, high-performance training, and deployment into one full-stack system for post-training at frontier scale - from SFT and RL to tool use, agent workflows, and continuously improving production models. We are building open frontier AI: open-source models trained end to end for long-horizon tasks like autonomous research, and the full-stack platform our own research team uses to build them. The next generation of AI companies, enterprises, and research teams do not just need more GPUs. They need the ability to turn their own workflows, tools, data, and feedback loops into superintelligence they own. Prime Intellect has raised $150M in total funding from Founders Fund, Radical Ventures, NVIDIA, and exceptional AI, infrastructure, and enterprise operators — including Andrej Karpathy, Dwarkesh Patel, and leaders and founders from Ramp, Perplexity, Harvey, Mercor, Zapier, Datadog, Cognition, OpenAI, Thinking Machines, Together AI, SemiAnalysis, LangChain, Browserbase, Cloudflare, Sierra, Databricks, Airbnb, OpenRouter, Standard Intelligence, Fleet, Core Auto, and more. We are looking for people who want to build at the intersection of frontier research, real infrastructure, and go-to-market for a category that does not fully exist yet.

Role Impact

Chip design is a natural fit for agentic reinforcement learning: long-horizon work, specialized tools, expensive mistakes, hard constraints, and objective feedback from simulation, verification, timing, power, and area. You will build agents, environments, evaluations, and post-training systems for real semiconductor design and verification workflows. The work is grounded in an external design workflow, with access to relevant domain experts and toolchains. It may span RTL generation and debugging, formal verification, simulation, physical design, optimization and orchestration across EDA tools.

Responsibilities

Applied Research at PrimeWe turn a workflow into tasks, environments, evaluations, reward signals, run post‑training experiments against real baselines, and deploy what works. When a result looks good, we find out whether the gain came from the model or from the data, harness, inference, or infrastructure. The reusable parts become shared research, open‑source systems and product capabilities. Every Applied Research role is externally facing. Most researchers work directly with customers, users, or research partners while maintaining a substantive research agenda.

Representative early problems

Build an interactive verification environment where an agent reads a specification, writes or repairs RTL, invokes simulation or formal tools, interprets failures, and iterates toward a verified result.

Design rewards and evaluations that combine functional correctness with tool efficiency, robustness, and performance/power/area constraints without opening easy shortcuts.

Train long‑horizon agents to recover from design and tool failures, preserve useful state, and generalise across blocks, designs, and constraint sets.

What you will own

Interactive environments where agents use EDA tools to modify designs, debug failures, and plan multi‑step work.

Verifiers and rewards grounded in tests, simulation, formal methods, design rules, and engineering outcomes.

Experiments on credit assignment when feedback arrives late and several tools contribute.

Evaluations for correctness, recovery, and generalisation, with reusable methods for other simulator‑grounded engineering domains.

Requirements

We are looking first for depth in RL, agents, or post‑training systems and the ability to become fluent in semiconductor workflows.

Prior work in design automation, compilers, formal methods or ML for systems is useful but not required.

Hands‑on experience building and debugging model‑training, post‑training, agent, evaluation or closely adjacent experimental loops.

Strong experimental judgment: meaningful baselines, careful trace inspection, clear failure attribution, and a willingness to change direction when the evidence changes.

Strong Python and the ability to build artifacts that other researchers and engineers can run, inspect and extend.

Comfort owning ambiguous problems and keeping partners and teammates current as you resolve them.

Evidence of exceptional work

We value publications, open‑source systems, benchmarks, and shipped products as evidence of exceptional work. Show us something difficult you built, what failed, and how the evidence changed your approach.

Benefits and Perks

• Cash Compensation Range of $150-300k + equity incentives
• Flexible Work (San Francisco, New York, London, or remote)
• Visa Sponsorship & relocation support
• Professional Development budget
• Team Off‑sites & conference attendance

If you're excited about the opportunity to build the foundation for the future of decentralized AI and create a platform that empowers developers and researchers to push the boundaries of what's possible, we'd love to hear from you.