Founding AI Engineer
At a glance
Mid-level AI Engineering role at Bronco. San Francisco · full-time · no salary stated · we estimate $183,750–$246,250.
Bronco has not published a salary for this role. The figure below is our estimate, not theirs.
aimlroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Build post-training workflows for models handling design verification work such as testbench creation, bug triage and coverage closure
- Set up reinforcement learning, reward models and human or AI feedback pipelines to improve decisions on extended verification tasks
- Create tool connections and execution frameworks so agents can work reliably with EDA environments and RTL artifacts
- Work with chip specialists and customers to turn verification know-how into training examples, reward signals and meaningful evaluations
- Track new work in LLM reasoning, agent reinforcement learning and tool use, then apply relevant methods in production
What you bring
- You have shipped agentic AI systems that operate in real-world settings
- You bring substantial hands-on post-training experience, including RLHF, DPO or a comparable approach
- You have built evaluation methods for LLMs or agent-based systems
- You are proficient in Python and PyTorch
Who this fits
This mid-level, founding engineering role suits someone who has built and shipped agentic AI and can develop the infrastructure to improve it systematically. Experience as a founder, founding engineer at an AI startup or researcher in an industry lab is relevant. The role is based in San Francisco.
From the employer
About Us
The future will have more chips, in more varieties, for more applications than ever before. The current way of designing, testing, and manufacturing them can't keep up. Outdated chip development processes are the present rate limiter on humanity's future.
Bronco's mission is to keep Moore's law going by building AI agents that automate large swaths of repetitive chip verification and design.
We're backed by tier-1 Silicon Valley investors and deployed with some of the largest chip companies in the world, supporting production SoC designs at leading-edge process nodes.
About the Role
As a Founding AI Engineer, you will own the core intelligence of Bronco's agents. That means designing the training pipelines, reward models, and evaluation harnesses that will make sure our agents actually succeed not just in benchmarks but on real production tapes.
The ideal candidate has built and shipped agentic AI systems as a founder, as a founding engineer, or as part of an industry research lab. You are high agency, know how to attack a problem, and can build the infrastructure to systematically make your systems better.
What You'll Do
- Design and implement post-training pipelines for domain-specific model behavior across DV tasks — testbench generation, bug triage, coverage closure
- Develop reinforcement learning setups, including reward modeling and RLHF/RLAIF pipelines, to improve agent decision-making on long-horizon verification tasks
- Build tool interfaces, scaffolding, and execution harnesses that allow models to interact reliably with EDA environments and RTL artifacts
- Iterate with silicon domain experts and customers to encode verification knowledge into training data, reward signals, and evals that measure real agent capability — not proxy metrics
- Stay current with frontier research in LLM reasoning, RL for agents, and tool use — and bring what's relevant into production
We'd Like to See
- You have shipped agentic AI systems that work in the real world
- Experience at an industry research lab, as a past founder, or as a founding engineer at an AI startup
- Deep hands-on experience with post-training: RLHF, DPO, or equivalent
- Experience designing evaluation frameworks for LLM or agentic systems
- Strong proficiency in Python and PyTorch
We'd Prefer If You Had
- Background in Electrical or Computer Engineering
- Familiarity with chip design and verification workflows
- Experience with EDA tools (Synopsys, Cadence, Questa, etc.)
- Publications at NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, DAC, ICCAD, or DVCon
What We Offer
- Competitive salary and equity package
- Comprehensive benefits including health, vision, dental, housing stipend, and 401(k) with match
- High-ownership, high-velocity environment with rapid learning opportunities
- A technical problem that is the present rate limiter on the future