Founding Member of Technical Staff - ML
Full-time•on-site•Palo Alto•$180k - $320k+ competitive
About this role
Degree: PhD in Computer Science, EECS, Mathematics, or a closely related field. Preferably, specialization in Machine Learning, Deep Learning or Artificial Intelligence. Or BS/MS with strong research engineering background from frontier labs, Deep Tech AI startups etc.
Background: We don't expect candidates to have any chip design background. Rather we would prefer candidates with strong ML background with an interest to apply that to hardware design.
Hands-On Experience:
Strong industry or research background building end-to-end ML pipelines, data curation and preparation, modeling including midtraining and post training using RL.
2+ years of industry experience; 4 yrs+ strongly preferred.
Core Skills:
Deep expertise in reinforcement learning and post-training, with a proven track record of taking models from research to real-world deployment—not just publishing papers.
Experience training and fine-tuning LLMs and code models for reasoning, tool use, and structured generation tasks (especially RTL and hardware design domains).
Strong hands-on background in local LLM/VLM deployment (vLLM, sgLang, LM Studio, Ollama, etc.) and distributed training/serving (QLoRA, ZeRO, PagedAttention, CUDA, PyTorch Parallelism).
Comfortable owning end-to-end RL post-training workflows—from reward modeling and environment design to test-time optimization and scaling.
Fast-moving builder who can prototype, benchmark, and productionize training pipelines with tight feedback loops.
Passionate about pushing state-of-the-art performance in code generation and reasoning under real-world engineering constraints.
Systems Knowledge: Bonus if comfortable with cloud-native architectures and distributed systems.
Bonus:
Worked at post-training team at frontier labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, Mistral, MSL, Cohere etc.
Foundation in Electrical/Computer Engineering and chip-design or verification processes but not required.
Publications in top ML (NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML) or EDA (DAC, ICCAD, DVCon) venues
Founding ML Engineer/ Researcher Early Hire at an AI deeptech startups.
About Architect
Architect is an AI research and product lab for chip design. We build AI models and systems that explore, design, optimize, and verify new hardware. Our goal is to cut the ASIC design time, cost, and human labor by 20x, enabling a new wave of more efficient and ever-specialized silicon.A Stanford spin-out, we are a team of researchers and engineers from Meta, Deepmind, Apple, and more. VC-backed, with angels including a Chief Scientist at Google, Stanford professors, and co-founders of chip companies.Architect is a prod cohort 5.0 company. Prod is one of the most exclusive accelerator in the world with <1% acceptance rate. Previous ursor (valued at 9.9 billion dollars), Mercor (10 billion dollars), Etched (1.5 billion dollars), Decart (3.1 billion dollars), Forge, Interaction, Mach Industries, and Delve, all of which began at Prod when they were only early-stage ideas.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What does Architect pay for a Founding Member of Technical Staff - ML?
Architect offers a competitive compensation package for the Founding Member of Technical Staff - ML role. The salary range is USD 180k - 320k per year, plus competitive equity. Apply through Clera to learn more about the full compensation details.
What does a Founding Member of Technical Staff - ML do at Architect?
The Founding Member of Technical Staff - ML role at Architect involves Degree: PhD in Computer Science, EECS, Mathematics, or a closely related field. Preferably, specialization in Machine Learning, Deep Learning or Artificial Intelligence.
Is the Founding Member of Technical Staff - ML position at Architect remote?
The Founding Member of Technical Staff - ML position at Architect is based in Palo Alto, United States and is on-site. Contact the company through Clera for specific work arrangement details.
How do I apply for the Founding Member of Technical Staff - ML position at Architect?
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