AI Research Scientist — Agentic AI and Foundation Models - CA, Santa Clara, United States
Originally posted 21 October 2026 by the employer.
About the role
AMD is seeking an AI Research Scientist to advance language models and intelligent agents for complex technical and research tasks. The role spans model training, agent design, and rigorous evaluation, with applications in software development, hardware design, verification, and performance optimization.
What you'll do
- Research methods for reasoning, planning, tool use, memory, and reliable execution of multistep tasks. - Develop pre-training and post-training approaches that strengthen models’ technical knowledge, coding abilities, and problem-solving capabilities. - Build learning pipelines using curated corpora, demonstrations, synthetic data, agent trajectories, and execution feedback. - Apply reinforcement learning and other adaptation methods to improve agent performance in executable environments. - Investigate inference-time reasoning and search to improve solution quality and computational efficiency. - Develop agents for software and hardware workflows, including code generation, RTL optimization, debugging, verification, and performance analysis.
What you'll need
- Strong Python and deep learning framework skills, with experience running reproducible experiments. - Experience applying AI to software development, hardware design, scientific computing, or optimization. - Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Electrical Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent research experience).
Nice to have
- Publication record in language models, AI agents, reinforcement learning, code intelligence, automated reasoning, or related areas at venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, or EMNLP. - Hands-on experience with LLM pre-training, continued pre-training, or post-training, including supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. - Experience building agents that interact with tools and executable environments. - Experience developing training datasets, generating synthetic data, or learning from agent trajectories and verifiable feedback. - Familiarity with distributed training, large-scale evaluation, or efficient inference. - Familiarity with RTL, simulation, formal verification, compilers, or GPU kernels.
Skills: foundation models, RTL optimization, agentic AI, verification, LLM
This role has been open 0 days — well below the 41-day median for EDA/CAD Engineering roles.
EDA/CAD Engineering · AI EDA Design
|
Open roles in category
62
|
Median days open
41 d
|
Median salary
$205k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | AMD | All employers we track in this specialty (62 roles · 24 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 4 | 62 |
| Open roles in the wider Physical Implementation family | 91 | 1489 · 110 employers |
| Median days open | 21 d | 41 d (−20 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $205k |
Skills observed across this category: foundation models, RTL optimization, agentic AI, verification, LLM
Who's hiring in this category
- NXP Semiconductors · 12 open roles · median 70 d
- NVIDIA · 8 open roles · median 28 d
- Keysight Technologies · 6 open roles · median 22 d
- Cadence Design Systems · 5 open roles · median 75 d
- Synopsys · 4 open roles · median 28 d
- Skyworks · 3 open roles · median 7 d
How we counted: 62 open EDA/CAD Engineering (AI EDA Design) roles from 24 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 22 Oct 2026. Specialty figures count only roles carrying this exact specialty label, so an employer's related work in neighbouring specialties is not included there — it is counted in the wider Physical Implementation family row. Figures refresh nightly.