Thinking Machines Lab
Software Engineer, Product
San Francisco · Senior
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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
- You'll work on early-stage product ideas that sit at the edge of what our models can do - moving from prototype to something real people rely on, often within weeks rather than quarters.
- You'll frequently be the first engineer on a given idea, which means real ownership over both the technical direction and the product itself.
- We're looking for someone who is energized by ambiguity, comfortable working across the entire stack, and motivated by getting new things in front of real users quickly.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and ship full stack features across our web applications - from backend services and APIs to production-quality frontend interfaces.
- Partner with researchers to understand model behavior, constraints, and capabilities, and translate them into product decisions.
- Work with design and product partners to define what to build, not just how to build it.
- Own the technical architecture of the products you build, including decisions about scalability, reliability, and maintainability as they mature.
- Strong track record shipping production web applications end to end, from data model and API design through polished user-facing interfaces.
- We believe the future worth building is human, and we're hiring people who want to build it.
Requirements
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with demonstrated ownership across both frontend and backend systems.
- Comfort working in ambiguous, fast-changing environments where product direction is still being discovered.
- Experience making pragmatic technical tradeoffs to move quickly without accumulating unmanageable risk.
Nice to have
- Experience as an early or founding engineer at a startup, or leading a product from 0 to 1.
- Experience with distributed systems, infrastructure, or backend performance work at scale.
- 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.
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.