Axiōma Search
Founding Research Engineer
How your CV stacks up
Upload your CV to see how well it fits this job role
?%
Founding Research Engineer
Deep Tech Startup | London
Compensation: up to £120k base + founding equity package
About
Building a chip takes hundreds of engineers and years of work. Physical design — the placement, routing, and timing of transistors — is one of the hardest stages: thousands of interdependent decisions, sparse domain data, and no general-purpose AI that understands circuit structure. This role exists to change that.
This is an early-stage startup backed by top EU investors, building an AI reasoning system for physical chip design. You'd be the first AI hire, working directly alongside the co-founding team and a founding chip design architect.
What you'll do
- Design and build AI reasoning systems that understand circuit structure and make design decisions autonomously
- Build post-training pipelines — fine-tuning, reward modelling, and feedback-driven learning on proprietary chip design data
- Develop synthetic data generation strategies for a domain with limited open-source examples
- Drive data strategy, model architecture, and inference optimisation across the full AI system
- Work directly with the founding chip design architect to understand problem structure and translate it into training signals
- Shape technical direction alongside the founders — framing problems, proposing approaches, designing experiments
Reasons to use Rodeo
Start with a chat, not a search bar
Grad scheme, placement, apprenticeship? Not sure what you want yet — that's fine. Your agent talks it through with you and turns "I have no idea" into a shortlist.
It searches the market for you
Every day your agent scans the market matching roles against what actually matters to you, not just keywords on a CV.
Only hits
No noise. No "maybe this fits." Just roles with a clear explanation of why they're right — and where to focus when applying.
What you'll need
- Deep, hands-on experience building AI systems for hard, novel problem domains — reasoning, mathematics, biology, physics, or similar
- Ability to build reasoning models from scratch: post-training, RL, fine-tuning, data strategy — not just deploying existing pipelines
- Strong fundamentals across model architecture, training dynamics, and inference optimisation
- First-principles mindset: given a new structured problem, you can understand it and build an AI system to solve it
- Startup mindset: comfortable with ambiguity, able to move fast without a large team behind you
Get help with your application
Your very own career expert that helps elevate your application to the next level.
Optional Bonus
- Experience with symbolic reasoning, graph-structured data, or formal methods
- Background in post-training for reasoning or maths-style models
- Synthetic data generation for low-data domains
Shortlisted candidates will be contacted within 48 hours.
“It took my CV and asked me questions relevant to understanding what kind of jobs to suggest for me. Suggestions were almost perfect. Jobs were exactly what I’ve been looking for.”
Jessica, London
Skills
Location