Research Evaluations Scientist - Post-Training & Benchmarks

Thinking Machines Lab; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 350,000 - 475,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, and vision benefits

Unlimited PTO

Paid parental leave

Relocation support

Job summary

Thinking Machines Lab in San Francisco, CA seeks a researcher to help develop reliable model evaluations for research signals, spanning evaluation creation, usability, auditing, and efficiency. You’ll work with researchers and engineers across post-training and the broader research organization, with opportunities to specialize or work across problems.

Responsibilities include creating internal evaluations and research signals, developing usability evaluations for real workflows, improving

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Physics, Mathematics, or a related discipline with strong theoretical and empirical grounding.
• Experience designing, building, or analyzing evaluations, benchmarks, datasets, graders, or other measurement systems.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to collaborate effectively across research and engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Create internal evaluations and research signals for capabilities and behaviors important to model research and post-training.
• Develop usability evaluations that measure whether models are genuinely useful in real research and product workflows, and partner with the data flywheel to turn evaluation insights into better data and training signals.
• Improve evaluation robustness, including grader reliability, ambiguous ground truth, evaluator disagreement, false positives and negatives, and gaps between measured and intended behavior.
• Build benchmark auditing methodologies that help researchers understand, trust, and appropriately use evaluation signals.
• Develop specialized agentic evaluation environments and user simulators, including supporting harness development and studying cross-user, cross-harness and cross-environment generalization.
• Develop evaluations for personalized preferences, biases, values, and other nuanced dimensions of model behavior in collaboration with post-training crafting.

Skills

Evaluations design

Cross-team collaboration

Python

Communication skills

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/ML/Physics/Math

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

JAX

Job description

Thinking Machines Lab in San Francisco, CA seeks a researcher to help develop reliable model evaluations for research signals, spanning evaluation creation, usability, auditing, and efficiency. You’ll work with researchers and engineers across post-training and the broader research organization, with opportunities to specialize or work across problems.

Responsibilities include creating internal evaluations and research signals, developing usability evaluations for real workflows, improving