Founding AI Engineer

Bronco

$150K — $250K *
Consumer Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years of experience in agentic AI systems design and implementation
  • Proven track record working in a research lab or as a startup founding engineer
  • In-depth knowledge of reinforcement learning techniques such as RLHF
  • Experience creating evaluation frameworks for AI systems
  • Proficiency in Python programming and PyTorch framework

Responsibilities

  • Design and implement model behavior pipelines for specific domain verification tasks
  • Develop reinforcement learning setups for improved agent decision-making
  • Create tools and interfaces for consistent model interaction with EDA environments
  • Collaborate with experts to encode verification knowledge into training data
  • Stay updated on LLM and reinforcement learning research and apply relevant findings

Benefits

  • Comprehensive health, vision, and dental insurance
  • Housing stipend
  • 401(k) plans with company match
  • Opportunities for rapid professional growth in a high-ownership environment
  • Work on critical technical challenges that impact future advancements
Full Job Description
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


The pay range for this role is:

150,000 - 250,000 USD per year (Bronco HQ)

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