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 the RoleWe're looking for a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to drive the reliability of Tinker end-to-end. You'll work alongside the engineers building the platform and research teams to make every layer of the system more robust and resilient.
About TinkerTinker 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. Tinker is rapidly adding new customers, features, and novel use-cases. We’re hiring to grow the platform alongside the Tinker community.
What You’ll DoDefine and own end-to-end reliability, from CI/CD flows to production observability and incident response.
Develop appropriate Service Level Objectives for distributed training systems, balancing job completion reliability and scheduling latency with development velocity.
Design and implement monitoring and observability across the full training path.
Drive incident response for Tinker platform issues, ensuring rapid recovery, thorough incident reviews, and systematic improvements that prevent recurrence.
Harden multi-tenant isolation and resource scheduling so that LoRA-based workload co-scheduling maximizes utilization without compromising reliability or data separation
Collaborate with security teams to address production vulnerabilities
Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in computer science, engineering, or similar.
Experience in distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, or site reliability engineering.
Proficiency writing software to solve reliability problems, including building tooling and automation.
Experience with production incident response, postmortems, and systematic reliability improvement.
Strong communication skills and track record of coordination across engineering and research teams.
Deep experience operating production cloud services at scale (e.g., public cloud platforms, internal cloud services)
Background in distributed training frameworks and how infrastructure failures surface in training behavior.
Track record building checkpoint and recovery systems for long-running distributed jobs.
Expertise in Kubernetes at scale: deploying, operating, debugging, and tuning clusters handling heterogeneous GPU workloads.
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
- Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in computer science, engineering, or a similar field
- Experience with distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, or site reliability engineering
- Proficiency writing software to solve reliability problems, including building tooling and automation
- Experience with production incident response, postmortems, and systematic reliability improvement
- Strong communication skills and experience coordinating across engineering and research teams
- Deep experience operating production cloud services at scale
- Background in distributed training frameworks and infrastructure failure behavior
- Experience building checkpoint and recovery systems for long-running distributed jobs
- Expertise deploying, operating, debugging, and tuning Kubernetes clusters handling heterogeneous GPU workloads
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.
