Thinking Machines Lab's mission is to empower humanity through advancing collaborative general intelligence. We're building a future where everyone has access to the knowledge and tools to make AI work for their unique needs and goals.
We are a small team of scientists, engineers, and builders who've created some of the most widely used AI products, like ChatGPT, Character.ai, Mistral, PyTorch, OpenAI Gym, Fairseq, and Segment Anything.
As our first Product Engineer, you’ll join a small, mission-driven team building the future of human-AI collaboration. You’ll combine technical prototyping, product intuition, and deep AI integration to create entirely new ways for people to work with AI.
This role is perfect for a builder. You spend your nights and weekends creating things that didn't exist before. You understand that making something exist comes before making it perfect, but you still care deeply about code quality and product taste. You'll work shoulder-to-shoulder with world-class AI researchers and designers, building new interfaces and products from the ground up. You might have built AI products before, but even if you haven't, you're excited to push the boundaries of what's possible with frontier models and infrastructure.
What You’ll Do- Design and prototype new interaction paradigms, pairing closely with our designer to shape the product through code, intuition, and craft
- Collaborate with world-class AI researchers to translate cutting-edge research into usable, intuitive product experiences that feel natural and powerful
- Move fast with full ownership, working end-to-end from initial concept through prototype to production deployment
- Shape the technical architecture and product decisions that will define how people experience collaborative intelligence
- As you grow in the role, you may have the opportunity to take on expanded responsibilities including technical leadership, product strategy, and mentoring future team members
- Technical expertise
- Full stack development experience with fluency across modern web frameworks and cloud infrastructure
- Demonstrated ability to build both frontend and backend systems, with experience hardening prototypes into production-level products
- Strong skills in rapid prototyping and iteration
- Product intuition
- Well-developed product taste and opinions about what great user experience looks like
- Experience with translating technical capabilities into compelling product features
- A bias toward speed and discovery, balanced with care for quality and craft
- Experience building AI-powered products or working with machine learning APIs
- Background in human-computer interaction
- Previous experience as founder or early engineer at a startup or in a zero-to-one role
- Published projects, open source contributions, or side projects that demonstrate technical creativity
- Location: This role is based in San Francisco, California.
- 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.
- Compensation: Depending on background, skills and experience, the expected annual salary range for this position is $300,000-$350,000 USD.
- We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification.
- As set forth in Thinking Machines' Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.
Top Skills
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.
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