Software Engineer, Research Tools
$300k - $350k • San Francisco • FullTime
Posted 1mo ago
Job Location
San Francisco
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Employment Type
FullTime
Categories
AI Engineer
About the job
Thinking Machines is building AI to extend human will and judgment, developing frontier models and crafting interfaces for human-AI communication. We are seeking a Software Engineer to join our full-stack team, which works closely with researchers to build systems that accelerate research and engineering velocity. You will own key parts of our internal platform, including evaluation and training libraries, experiment-tracking systems, and visualization tools. This role involves identifying researcher bottlenecks and transforming them into reliable, generalizable systems, requiring strong technical judgment, cross-functional collaboration, and product intuition. Success means building systems that researchers trust, rely on daily, and find delightful to use.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and maintain research infrastructure, including evaluation frameworks, training systems, experiment tracking platforms, and visualization tools.
- Work across backend systems, data pipelines, and user-facing applications to deliver tools end-to-end.
- Partner directly with researchers to identify bottlenecks and unlock new capabilities, treating research tooling as a product.
- Proactively gather feedback, set priorities, and measure adoption for research tools.
- Build systems for reproducibility, traceability, and robust quality control across research experiments and model training runs, incorporating monitoring and observability.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, machine learning, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Two years of post-grad work experience as a software engineer or ML engineer (excluding internships).
- Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience building reliable, maintainable systems.
- Proficiency in at least one backend programming language (primarily Python and Rust).
- Experience with frontend technologies like React and Typescript.
- Experience working with databases, data warehouses (Clickhouse), and caching systems (Redis).
- Comfort working across the full stack and owning projects from discovery through deployment and operation.
- Experience collaborating with cross-functional partners and subject-matter experts.
- Track record of building tools for researchers, improving developer productivity, or creating technical products for technical users (preferred).
- Experience building polished, intuitive user-facing applications with strong product judgment and attention to UI/UX detail (preferred).
- Experience at a startup or on a small team building technically complex products end-to-end (preferred).
- Experience building or maintaining ML research infrastructure (preferred).
- Experience working closely with researchers to understand and solve their tooling needs (preferred).
Benefits
- Generous health, dental, and vision benefits
- Unlimited PTO
- Paid parental leave
- Relocation support as needed