MTS - Agent Research - San Jose, United States
Originally posted 25 September 2026 by the employer.
About the role
This role involves setting the research direction and spearheading the development of self-improving agents to reliably complete difficult, long-running engineering tasks. The focus will be on ASIC development, inference, and supercomputing.
What you'll do
- Own the research agenda for agentic systems, identify bottlenecks, and prioritize approaches.
- Work with domain engineers to understand workflows, diagnose agent failures, and formulate research questions.
- Develop systems for long-running tasks, including memory, context management, tool use, planning, and coordination.
- Build evaluations measuring correctness, reliability, and efficiency on engineering tasks, verifying production gains.
- Train custom models using SFT, RL, and distillation, with the agent harness in the training loop.
- Scale experiments to hundreds or thousands of concurrent agents while maintaining reproducibility and control over compute costs.
What you'll need
- Strong research taste and a record of turning ambiguous problems into clear hypotheses, experiments, and useful systems.
- Excellent engineering ability to move between research exploration, agent experimentation, low-level debugging, and production execution.
- Experience building agents for complex, multi-step tasks, with practical understanding of context, memory, tools, evaluation, and failure recovery.
- Hands-on experience with LLM post-training, including SFT and RL.
- A track record of making meaningful progress under compute and data constraints.
- Ability to set technical direction and work with domain experts to turn research into trusted systems.
Nice to have
- Experience with ASIC design or verification, accelerator kernels, inference systems, or large-scale compute infrastructure.
Skills: self-improving agents, long-running engineering tasks, ASIC development, LLM post-training, agent harness
This role has been open 2 days — well below the 68-day median for AI/ML Hardware Engineering roles.
AI/ML Hardware Engineering · AI ML Hardware
|
Open roles in category
509
|
Median days open
68 d
|
Median salary
$225k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Etched | All employers we track in this specialty (509 roles · 75 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 7 | 509 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 39 | 5833 · 143 employers |
| Median days open | 97 d | 68 d (+29 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $225k |
Skills observed across this category: self-improving agents, long-running engineering tasks, ASIC development, LLM post-training, agent harness
Who's hiring in this category
- Qualcomm · 105 open roles · median 102 d
- NVIDIA · 81 open roles · median 65 d
- AMD · 46 open roles · median 61 d
- Micron Technology · 32 open roles · median 45 d
- Mobileye · 21 open roles · median 61 d
- Analog Devices · 14 open roles · median 30 d
How we counted: 509 open AI/ML Hardware Engineering (AI ML Hardware) roles from 75 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 27 Sept 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 Software, Firmware & Systems family row. Figures refresh nightly.