Thinking Machines Lab
Software Engineer, Infrastructure
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
- You'll work on the systems underlying everything we do - from the clusters that train our frontier models with Inkling, to the multi-tenant serving infrastructure behind Tinker.
- This is a foundational infrastructure role at a fast-moving startup.
- You'll have real ownership over systems that run at large scale, and your work will directly determine how quickly our research and product teams can iterate.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate distributed systems that support large-scale model training and inference across thousands of accelerators
- Build and maintain core infrastructure, including orchestration, scheduling, storage, and resource management systems
- Partner with researchers and platform engineers to understand infrastructure needs and turn them into robust, well-abstracted systems
- Write and maintain internal libraries and APIs, primarily in Python and Go, that other engineers build on
- Demonstrated expertise designing and developing large-scale distributed systems
- Experience building, deploying, and operating production infrastructure at scale
- We believe the future worth building is human, and we're hiring people who want to build it.
Requirements
- Strong proficiency in Python and Go
Nice to have
- Experience with ML infrastructure, such as training orchestration, job schedulers, or distributed storage and data systems
- Experience operating large-scale GPU or TPU clusters
- Experience with container orchestration (e.g. Kubernetes) and infrastructure-as-code
- Contributions to open-source infrastructure projects
- 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.