Thinking Machines Lab
Software Engineer, Evaluation Platform / Infra
San Francisco
Stay score
odds of building a lasting career here
Sponsors, but it's cap-subject — you still face the weighted lottery (~61% per draw at Level IV). Good if you win; have a cap-exempt backup on your list.
Lottery odds assume a STEM candidate.
Personalize to your clock →H-1B wage level
the lottery is wage-weighted — each level is one more entry
This range already reaches Level IV — the maximum four lottery entries.
DOL prevailing wage, 2026-27 wage year · Software Developers (15-1252) · San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA. Wage level is derived by USCIS from the offered wage, occupation and worksite; the occupation shown is inferred from the job title.
Employer immigration record
from this employer's Department of Labor filings
Files H-1B transfers
Sourced from Department of Labor LCA, PERM and prevailing-wage disclosure data. Employer matching is by name, so figures may be split across an employer's legal entities. Absence of a filing means none appears in our copy of the data, not that none exists.
Community outcomes
No reports yet — be the first to help the next applicant.
About the role
- It guides research direction, powers experimentation, and helps us understand whether changes to data and training are improving the capabilities and behaviors we care about.
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.
- Partner directly with researchers to identify bottlenecks and turn bespoke workflows into self-serve systems that work across teams.
- 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.
Requirements
- Two years of post-grad work experience as a software engineer or ML engineer, exclusive of internships.
- Proficiency in at least one backend programming language
- 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.
Nice to have
- We encourage you to apply even if you meet only some of these:
- Experience with distributed job execution, workflow orchestration, sandboxed environments, or large-scale data processing.
- Familiarity with large language or multimodal model evaluation, including model-based grading, human evaluation, or synthetic data.
- Experience working closely with researchers to understand their workflows and turn rapidly evolving needs into durable systems.
- 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.
Compensation
- Depending on background, skills and experience, the expected annual salary range for this position is $300,000 - $350,000 USD.
Benefits
- Thinking Machines offers generous health, dental, and vision benefits, unlimited PTO, paid parental leave, and relocation support as needed.
- Build flexible abstractions for evaluation tasks, environments, graders, datasets, and model outputs without constraining fast-moving research.
- A bachelor's degree, or equivalent practical experience, in computer science, engineering, machine learning, or a related field.
Company info
- 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.
Visa & Work Authorization
- 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.
This listing is sourced directly from Thinking Machines Lab's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.