Research Engineer, Domain Scaling

About the role

Normal Computing is looking for a Research Engineer to join its Domain Scaling team. You will bridge applied AI research and data engineering to make the company’s agents world‑class for chip‑engineering and EDA tasks. The role blends end‑to‑end RL environment creation, data strategy, and close collaboration with domain experts.

Key responsibilities

• Define and execute the data strategy for knowledge‑work verticals, from task sourcing to RL training.
• Build and manage relationships with external vendors, evaluating data quality and designing reward signals.
• Design RL environments for high‑value chip‑engineering tasks and measure their impact on model performance.
• Develop QA frameworks to detect reward hacking and ensure environment robustness.
• Run generalisation experiments to assess how data‑strategy changes improve model capabilities.
• Partner with AI researchers and product teams to translate capability goals into training environments and real‑world features.

Required profile

• Experience with post‑training large language models for specific domains.
• Background in reinforcement learning, reward design, or training data curation for LLMs.
• Comfort managing technical vendor relationships and iterating quickly on feedback.
• Strong analytical skills for reviewing datasets and spotting issues.
• Passion for applying AI to chip development and hardware self‑improvement.

Required skills

• Reinforcement learning
• Large language models (LLMs)
• Reward design
• Training data curation
• UVM (Universal Verification Methodology)
• Electronic Design Automation (EDA)
• Chip‑engineering knowledge