Research Engineer (AI)

Location: On-site in San Jose, United States. Fully in-person work at the Santana Row office; relocation support is available for those moving to San Jose.

Salary: $400K+ plus significant equity.

Company

hirify.global builds inference-focused AI hardware and software by co-designing chips, racks, software, and manufacturing systems for high throughput and low latency.

What you will do

• Own the post-training stack end to end, including supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning.
• Build reinforcement learning environments with ASIC, kernel, and supercomputing engineers.
• Use simulations, formal tools, tests, and hardware measurements to create verifiable rewards.
• Create custom data mixes and train proprietary frontier models for difficult engineering tasks.
• Develop benchmarks that improve model productivity and prevent reward hacking.
• Optimize reinforcement learning systems to make training loops faster and more cost-efficient.

Requirements

• Hands-on post-training experience, including SFT and RL such as PPO or GRPO, with shipped models used by people.
• Experience improving a model from poor to strong performance on a task it was not built for, ideally with scarce data.
• Strong PyTorch and distributed-training engineering skills, including the ability to inspect rollouts and validate metrics.
• Strong understanding of the systems side of reinforcement learning.
• Ability to make effective engineering decisions under compute and data constraints.
• Willingness to work fully in person in San Jose.

Nice to have

• Experience with reinforcement learning or post-training frameworks such as verl, OpenRLHF, TRL, or prime-rl.
• Experience with inference engines such as vLLM or SGLang.
• Experience with agentic, multi-turn reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards.
• Experience with distillation and training small specialized models for production.
• Experience in ASIC design or verification, accelerator kernels, or large-scale compute infrastructure.
• Former founder experience.

Culture & Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision packages with generous premium coverage.
• $500 monthly credit for waiving medical benefits.
• $2,500 monthly housing subsidy for employees living within walking distance of the office.
• Wellness benefits covering fitness and mental health.
• Daily lunch and dinner at the office.
• Unlimited compute budget subject to return-on-investment justification, plus significant equity.