Evaluation Platform Engineer for Frontier AI

Thinking Machines Lab Inc.; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 300,000 - 350,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, and vision benefits

Unlimited PTO

Parental leave

Relocation support

Job summary

Thinking Machines is hiring a researcher-focused engineer to design, build, and maintain an end-to-end evaluation platform for frontier AI models. You will work across Python frameworks, data pipelines, APIs, and user-facing applications to streamline model evaluation and turn results into research decisions.

Collaborate with pre-training, post-training, and applied teams, and partner with researchers to identify bottlenecks, create self-serve workflows, and ensure reproducibility with

Qualifications

• A bachelor’s degree, or equivalent practical experience, in computer science, engineering, machine learning, or related field.
• Two years of post-grad work experience as a software engineer or ML engineer.
• Hands-on experience building or maintaining evaluations, benchmarks, graders, or model-quality systems for large language or multimodal models.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience building reliable, maintainable systems.
• Proficiency in at least one backend programming language; we primarily use Python and Rust. We use React and Typescript on the frontend.
• Experience with databases, data pipelines, distributed systems, or other data-intensive infrastructure.
• Comfort working across the stack and owning projects from initial problem discovery through deployment and operation.
• Experience collaborating with cross-functional partners and subject-matter experts.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain the platform for authoring, running, tracking, and analyzing model evaluations that are critical in day to day work and model releases.
• Work across evaluation libraries, distributed backend systems, data pipelines, APIs, and user-facing applications to deliver capabilities end to end.
• Build flexible abstractions for evaluation tasks, environments, graders, datasets, and model outputs without constraining fast-moving research.
• Make evaluation results reproducible and trustworthy through versioning, provenance, observability, failure recovery, and robust quality controls.
• Partner directly with researchers to identify bottlenecks and turn bespoke workflows into self-serve systems that work across teams.
• Work with Research Tooling, the engineering team behind Thinking Machines’ internal research platform.

Skills

Backend programming

Frontend development

Collaborating with researchers

Problem solving

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience in CS/Engineering/ML

Tools

Python

Rust

React

TypeScript

Databases

Data pipelines

Distributed systems

Job description

Thinking Machines is hiring a researcher-focused engineer to design, build, and maintain an end-to-end evaluation platform for frontier AI models. You will work across Python frameworks, data pipelines, APIs, and user-facing applications to streamline model evaluation and turn results into research decisions.

Collaborate with pre-training, post-training, and applied teams, and partner with researchers to identify bottlenecks, create self-serve workflows, and ensure reproducibility with