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Research Engineer - Hardware, Data

Phinity

San Francisco, CA · Posted October 9, 2026

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This listing does not state pay. Across 71 open research engineer listings that state pay, the middle half runs $227,500 to $406,500 and the median is $265,000.

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About the job

Phinity is an AI research lab focused on solving chip design. The bottleneck to AGI is compute, and we enable AI agents to tape-out chips autonomously, from architecture to post-silicon. We are building RL environments, agent infrastructure, and evaluation systems to accomplish this. Our team brings together deep AI and silicon expertise, including leaders and executives from top chip companies, post-training chip-design models at NVIDIA, AI for formal verification research, previous exits, and over 10 years of experience building chips at NVIDIA, Intel, Mediatek, and others.

We are hiring a Research Engineer to develop data in order to train and evaluate agents on hardware tasks.

You will

Build and scale out generation of novel, experimental environments for testing agents in real-world hardware engineering tasks

Profile and benchmark unreleased models

Run and experiment on research problems at the intersection of hardware engineering and reinforcement learning

What we’re looking for

Prior low-level systems and/or VLSI experience

Good research intuitions and rigorous engineering skills

Leadership skills; high ownership

ML/RL background is a plus

Operational experience is a plus

Why Phinity

Work directly with frontier AI labs to re-imagine ASIC design–see the frontier of intelligence before anyone else

Collaborate with our AI researchers and HW experts, with high leverage and ownership to develop new technologies

Benefits include

Health insurance

Retirement plans

Unlimited PTO

Paid parental leave

Lunch and dinner provided in-office