Frontier AI Product Lead — Post-Training

Thinking Machines Lab Inc.; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 350,000 - 400,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, vision benefits

Unlimited PTO

Paid parental leave

Relocation support

Job summary

Thinking Machines Lab Inc. is hiring a Post-training Product Manager to operate at the seam of research and product. You will work with post-training researchers to understand work deeply, ask the right questions, surface connections, and help decide what matters next.

The role requires judgment, technical fluency, user empathy, discretion, and clarity without bureaucracy. The position sits at the intersection of research, model behavior, data, and environments, with responsibilities spanning

Qualifications

• Experience as an early or first product leader in a technical startup, AI lab, research organization, or new product area where the role and operating model were not defined for you.
• Experience working closely with model training, post-training, RL, evaluations, data, safety, inference, developer platforms, or other technically demanding research-product areas.
• Ability to understand research deeply enough to earn trust, ask sharp questions, and connect technical choices to model behavior and users without overstating your expertise.
• Strong track record identifying missing connections, unresolved assumptions, or cross-team decisions that specialists may not see while deep in the work.

Responsibilities

• Partner with post-training research leaders on priorities, sequencing, and the connection between research work and the broader model and product agenda.
• Maintain a clear view across SFT, RL, data and environments, evaluations, safety, model behavior, inference, training infrastructure, and product dependencies; identify gaps before they become blockers.
• Translate ambiguous research and product questions into concrete learning plans: what must be true, what evidence would change the decision, which experiments or user signals matter, and when to revisit the direction.
• Build lightweight operating mechanisms for critical work with owners, state, dependencies, decisions, risks, and release criteria without imposing a rigid software process on research.
• Bring qualitative and quantitative evidence about model behavior and real workflows into research prioritization, ensuring user knowledge is represented accurately.
• Connect research, product, infrastructure, safety, and leadership when a decision spans teams or when local optimization creates broader tradeoffs.
• Support the path from research result to usable capability: internal adoption, evaluation, documentation, release readiness, product integration, and feedback after launch.
• Write clear narratives detailing learnings, uncertainties, needed decisions, and why the work matters.

Skills

Product leadership

Technical fluency

User empathy

Discretion

Clarity under ambiguity

Job description

Thinking Machines Lab Inc. is hiring a Post-training Product Manager to operate at the seam of research and product. You will work with post-training researchers to understand work deeply, ask the right questions, surface connections, and help decide what matters next.

The role requires judgment, technical fluency, user empathy, discretion, and clarity without bureaucracy. The position sits at the intersection of research, model behavior, data, and environments, with responsibilities spanning