Thinking Machines Lab
Research Lead, Tinker, Fine-tuning Science
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 →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
- This includes the ability to train model weights.
- This is a player-coach role: you'll stay hands-on in the science while growing the team, shaping its direction, and making sure findings ship into Tinker.
- You'll work closely with our internal research teams, contribute to open science, and engage with external users.
Responsibilities
- Set the research agenda: choose the problems, place the bets, and own the roadmap for pushing Tinker quality, efficiency, and reliability to the frontier.
- Lead and grow the team: hire, mentor, and develop researchers, and set the bar for experimental rigor and research taste.
- Clarity in communication: an ability to explain complex technical concepts in writing and to build alignment across science, systems/infra, product.
Requirements
- A track record of leading research - setting direction for a team or a major research effort and delivering on it.
- Comfort debugging distributed training and writing code that scales.
- You can look at experimental data and distinguish between real effects, noise, and bugs.
- Experience managing or analyzing human data collection campaigns or large-scale annotation workflows.
- Experience with RL training stability techniques for large runs.
Nice to have
- we encourage you to apply if you meet some but not all of these:
Compensation
- Depending on background, skills and experience, the expected annual salary range for this position is $350,000 - $475,000 USD.
Benefits
- Thinking Machines offers generous health, dental, and vision benefits, unlimited PTO, paid parental leave, and relocation support as needed.
- Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Physics, Mathematics, or a related discipline with strong theoretical and empirical grounding.
- Proficiency in Python and familiarity with deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX).
Company info
- Stay hands-on in areas like LoRA and parameter-efficient fine-tuning and how they interact with RL and post-training.
- Improve the stability, efficiency, and reliability of large-scale fine-tuning and RL runs on Tinker.
- Represent the work externally through papers, technical blog posts, and community contributions.
- Strong interest in our mission to enable custom models.
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.