Frontier AI Product Manager: Post-Training & Research

Precision Labs; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 350,000 - 400,000; Full time

Job summary

Thinking Machines is hiring a Post-Training Product Manager in San Francisco. This role partners with post-training researchers to align priorities, translate research questions into learning plans, and ensure a clear linkage between research work and the broader model and product agenda.

You will manage loops between research priorities, model behavior, data, infrastructure, and product direction, keeping a high-level view while teams dive deep into concrete challenges.

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 another technically demanding research-product area.
• Ability to understand research deeply enough to earn trust, ask sharp questions, and connect technical choices to model behaviour and users without overstating your expertise.
• Strong track record identifying the missing connection, unresolved assumption, or cross-team decision that specialists may not see while deep in the work.

Responsibilities

• Partner with post-training research leaders on priorities, sequencing, decision points, 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 the team should revisit the direction
• Build lightweight operating mechanisms for critical work — owners, state, dependencies, decisions, risks, release criteria, and follow-through — without imposing a software-development process on research
• Bring qualitative and quantitative evidence about model behavior and real workflows into research prioritization, ensuring user knowledge is represented accurately rather than flattened into feature requests
• Connect research, product, infrastructure, safety, and leadership when a decision spans teams or when local optimization creates a broader product or model tradeoff
• Support the path from research result to usable capability: internal adoption, evaluation, documentation, release readiness, product integration, and feedback after launch
• Write clear narratives that explain what the team has learned, what remains uncertain, what decisions are needed, and why the work matters
• Take on the unowned work that is necessary to move a critical research-product outcome forward

Skills

Early product leader

Technical startup experience

Cross-disciplinary collaboration

Strong questioning

Job description

Thinking Machines is hiring a Post-Training Product Manager in San Francisco. This role partners with post-training researchers to align priorities, translate research questions into learning plans, and ensure a clear linkage between research work and the broader model and product agenda.

You will manage loops between research priorities, model behavior, data, infrastructure, and product direction, keeping a high-level view while teams dive deep into concrete challenges.