Thinking Machines Lab
Software Engineer, Sandboxing
San Francisco
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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.
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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.
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About the role
- This is foundational infrastructure: every research experiment and every product surface that lets a model take action depends on it being fast, secure, and dependable.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate sandboxed execution environments for running untrusted, model-generated code and tool calls at scale.
- Build the scheduling, resource-management, and lifecycle systems that provision, reuse, and tear down sandboxes efficiently under heavy concurrent load.
- Partner with researchers and Tinker's product team to expose sandboxing primitives that are simple to use and hard to misuse.
- Own reliability and performance of the sandboxing platform end-to-end, from API design down to the underlying virtualization layer.
- Experience building or operating isolation or virtualization technology, such as containers, microVMs (e.g. Firecracker, Cloud Hypervisor), or sandboxed runtimes (e.g. gVisor, Kata Containers).
- Thrive in a highly collaborative environment involving many, different cross-functional partners and subject matter experts.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in computer science, engineering, or similar.
- Proficiency in at least one backend language (we use Python or Rust).
- Comfort operating across the stack and owning projects end-to-end.
Nice to have
- Experience securing systems that execute untrusted or adversarial code, including threat modeling and hardening against sandbox escapes.
- Familiarity with running large-scale, multi-tenant infrastructure on Kubernetes or similar orchestration systems.
- Experience with performance-sensitive systems programming and reducing cold-start latency for ephemeral compute.
- Track record of contributing to open-source infrastructure or security tooling.
- 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.
Skills
- This is foundational infrastructure:
- every research experiment and every product surface that lets a model take action depends on it being fast, secure, and dependable.
- Our models and agents increasingly need to run code, use tools, and take actions in the world - safely, reliably, and at scale.
Compensation
- Depending on background, skills and experience, the expected annual salary range for this position is $300,000 - $400,000 USD.
Benefits
- Thinking Machines offers generous health, dental, and vision benefits, unlimited PTO, paid parental leave, and relocation support as needed.
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.