Thinking Machines Lab
Software Engineer, Inference
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
- Our research and inference teams push the limits of model performance and serving efficiency
- this role makes sure those gains reach production safely and stay up - powering Tinker's live, multi-tenant serving and the products built on top of our models.
- This is a production-facing systems role at the center of the company.
Responsibilities
- Own the rollout process for new models, model versions, and inference optimizations, ensuring safe, incremental deployment to production
- Build and improve observability, alerting, and capacity planning so the team can detect, diagnose, and resolve production issues quickly
- Partner with inference and research teams to productionize new serving techniques without compromising reliability
- Lead incident response for production inference issues, driving root cause analysis and durable fixes
- Design for graceful degradation, failover, and redundancy so that serving stays resilient as usage grows
- Manage capacity and cost tradeoffs for serving infrastructure as traffic and model sizes scale
- We believe the future worth building is human, and we're hiring people who want to build it.
Requirements
- Experience operating large-scale, latency-sensitive production systems
- Proficiency in Python and Go or another systems language
- Experience with observability, monitoring, and incident response for production services
- Strong understanding of distributed systems and how they fail at scale
Nice to have
- Experience running production inference for large language models or other large-scale ML systems
- Experience with deployment and rollout systems, such as canarying, blue/green deploys, or feature flags
- Experience with capacity planning and cost optimization for GPU or TPU infrastructure
- Familiarity with inference-specific techniques, such as batching, caching, or quantization, and their operational implications
- Comfortable being on-call and leading incident response for critical production systems
- Comfortable working with high autonomy in a fast-changing, early-stage environment
- 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 - $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.