Software Engineer, Infrastructure

Thinking Machines Lab Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 300,000 - 400,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, and vision benefits

Unlimited PTO

Paid parental leave

Relocation support

Job summary

Thinking Machines is hiring a Software Engineer, Infrastructure to design and build the distributed systems powering our model training and serving platforms in San Francisco. You will own critical infrastructure used by research and product teams.

The role emphasizes large-scale systems, Python and Go, and collaboration with researchers and platform engineers. This is a fast-moving startup environment with real ownership and impact.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated expertise designing and developing large-scale distributed systems.
• Strong proficiency in Python and Go.
• Experience building, deploying, and operating production infrastructure at scale.
• Solid grounding in distributed systems fundamentals, such as consensus, consistency, fault tolerance, and networking.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate distributed systems that support large-scale model training and inference across thousands of accelerators.
• Build and maintain core infrastructure, including orchestration, scheduling, storage, and resource management systems.
• Improve the reliability, performance, and observability of infrastructure used across research and product teams.
• Partner with researchers and platform engineers to understand infrastructure needs and turn them into robust, well-abstracted systems.
• Debug and resolve complex distributed failures across the stack, from networking and storage to compute and scheduling.
• Write and maintain internal libraries and APIs, primarily in Python and Go, that other engineers build on.

Skills

Distributed systems design

Python

Go

Production infra

Kubernetes

IaC

Tools

Kubernetes

Terraform

Job description

About Thinking Machines

The mission of Thinking Machines is to build AI that extends human will and judgment. We are training frontier models with Inkling, developing Tinker to let people make models their own, and crafting interfaces that broaden human-AI communication. We believe the future worth building is human, and we're hiring people who want to build it.

About the Role

We're hiring a Software Engineer, Infrastructure to design and build the distributed systems that power our model training and serving platforms. You'll work on the systems underlying everything we do — from the clusters that train our frontier models with Inkling, to the multi-tenant serving infrastructure behind Tinker.

This is a foundational infrastructure role at a fast-moving startup. You'll have real ownership over systems that run at large scale, and your work will directly determine how quickly our research and product teams can iterate.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and operate distributed systems that support large-scale model training and inference across thousands of accelerators

• Build and maintain core infrastructure, including orchestration, scheduling, storage, and resource management systems

• Improve the reliability, performance, and observability of infrastructure used across research and product teams

• Partner with researchers and platform engineers to understand infrastructure needs and turn them into robust, well-abstracted systems

• Debug and resolve complex distributed failures across the stack, from networking and storage to compute and scheduling

• Write and maintain internal libraries and APIs, primarily in Python and Go, that other engineers build on

Skills & Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• Demonstrated expertise designing and developing large-scale distributed systems

• Strong proficiency in Python and Go

• Experience building, deploying, and operating production infrastructure at scale

• Solid grounding in distributed systems fundamentals, such as consensus, consistency, fault tolerance, and networking

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with ML infrastructure, such as training orchestration, job schedulers, or distributed storage and data systems

• Experience operating large-scale GPU or TPU clusters

• Experience with container orchestration (e.g. Kubernetes) and infrastructure-as-code

• Contributions to open-source infrastructure projects

• Comfortable working with high autonomy in a fast-changing, early-stage environment

Logistics

• Location: This role is based in San Francisco, CA.

• Compensation: Depending on background, skills and experience, the expected annual salary range for this position is $300,000 - $400,000 USD.

• Visa sponsorship: We sponsor visas. While we can't guarantee success for every candidate or role, if you're the right fit, we're committed to working through the visa process together.

• Benefits: Thinking Machines offers generous health, dental, and vision benefits, unlimited PTO, paid parental leave, and relocation support as needed.