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. We believe the future worth building is human, and we're hiring people who want to build it.
About Tinker & InklingTinker is our fine-tuning API that empowers researchers and developers to customize frontier AI to their needs — opening access to capabilities that have previously been concentrated in a handful of labs. We manage the infrastructure while allowing Tinkerers full flexibility in training open weights models with their own data, algorithms, and for their own needs.
Inkling is our open-weights model. It is a Mixture-of-Experts transformer with 975B total parameters, 41B active. It supports a context window of up to 1M tokens. It was pretrained on 45 trillion tokens of text, images, audio and video. It is the first in a family of models of different sizes.
About the RoleWe're hiring a Developer Relations Engineer to help the open source community build with Thinking Machines' products — Inkling and the models that follow it, and Tinker, our fine-tuning platform. You'll work hands-on with real users, turn their feedback into product improvements, and help developers get the most out of our models and tools.
This role sits at the intersection of engineering, research and community: you'll write code, ship industry leading ML recipes and integrations, and also represent Thinking Machines externally through talks, demos, and technical writing. It's a great fit for someone who's happiest building in a code editor, but who also enjoys teaching and engaging with a fast-growing developer community.
What You'll DoWrite, test, and maintain high-quality agentic training, code examples and documentation for Inkling and Tinker
Work directly with developers and researchers in the open source community to debug issues, gather feedback, and improve their experience fine-tuning and deploying models
Partner with the research and infrastructure teams to turn community patterns and feedback into concrete improvements to Inkling, future models, Tinker, and develop new post-training recipes.
Build demos, integrations, and tools that make it easier for developers to adopt and get value from Thinking Machines' models
Represent Thinking Machines in the open source community through blog posts, talks and tutorials, livestreams, and conference and meetup appearances
Help shape the developer experience roadmap as new models and platform features ship
5+ years of experience in developer relations, developer experience, or a software engineering role with significant open source or community-facing work
Strong software engineering skills, with experience writing and shipping production-quality Python code
Hands-on experience fine-tuning, evaluating, or deploying large language models
Experience with supervised and reinforcement learning fine-tuning of LLMs, post-training on new domains, and improving model capability
Track record contributing to, maintaining, or growing open source software libraries
Experience writing public or internal tutorials, cookbooks, or technical content that helped others understand and apply technical concepts
Comfortable engaging publicly through talks, livestreams, or conference and meetup appearances
Familiarity with multimodal models (text, image, audio) and the tradeoffs involved in training, fine-tuning, and inference
Location: This role is based in San Francisco, California.
Compensation: Depending on background, skills and experience, the expected annual salary range for this position is $300,000 - $350,000 USD.
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.
Benefits: Thinking Machines offers generous health, dental, and vision benefits, unlimited PTO, paid parental leave, and relocation support as needed.
Skills Required
- 5+ years of experience in developer relations, developer experience, or software engineering with significant open source or community-facing work
- Strong software engineering skills
- Experience writing and shipping production-quality Python code
- Hands-on experience fine-tuning, evaluating, or deploying large language models
- Experience with supervised and reinforcement learning fine-tuning of LLMs
- Experience with post-training on new domains and improving model capability
- Track record contributing to, maintaining, or growing open source software libraries
- Experience writing public or internal tutorials, cookbooks, or technical content explaining technical concepts
- Comfort engaging publicly through talks, livestreams, conferences, and meetups
- Familiarity with multimodal models and training, fine-tuning, and inference tradeoffs
What We Do
Thinking Machines Lab is an artificial intelligence research and product company. We're building a future where everyone has access to the knowledge and tools to make AI work for their unique needs and goals. While AI capabilities have advanced dramatically, key gaps remain. The scientific community's understanding of frontier AI systems lags behind rapidly advancing capabilities. Knowledge of how these systems are trained is concentrated within the top research labs, limiting both the public discourse on AI and people's abilities to use AI effectively. And, despite their potential, these systems remain difficult for people to customize to their specific needs and values. To bridge the gaps, we're building Thinking Machines Lab to make AI systems more widely understood, customizable and generally capable. We are scientists, engineers, and builders who've created some of the most widely used AI products, including ChatGPT and Character.ai, open-weights models like Mistral, as well as popular open source projects like PyTorch, OpenAI Gym, Fairseq, and Segment Anything.
