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 hiring a Software Engineer to build and own our web-crawling systems, from distributed collection at internet scale through filtering, deduplication, and deciding what data we keep.
The ideal candidate has built and scaled a web crawler or large-scale data-acquisition systems. In this role, you'll write and own production systems: the crawler itself, the infrastructure that runs it at scale, and the pipelines that turn raw crawls into usable pretraining data. You'll work closely with our pretraining and data teams to understand what's actually moving model quality, but this is fundamentally an engineering role, not a research one.
What You'll DoDesign and scale the web crawler and ingestion infrastructure that sources Inkling's pretraining data
Build pipelines for large-scale extraction, deduplication, and data quality filtering
Build specialized crawlers for high-value or hard-to-reach data sources
Work with the pretraining team to understand how changes in crawled data affect model performance
Improve the reliability and efficiency of crawling and ingestion infrastructure at petabyte scale
Help set technical direction for this area as it grows, and bring other engineers up to speed on what you've learned
8+ years designing, building, and scaling web crawlers, scrapers, or large-scale distributed data-acquisition systems
A track record of owning crawler or data-acquisition infrastructure at internet scale
Strong software engineering skills in a language such as Python, Go, or Rust, with real experience in distributed systems
Working knowledge of the practical and legal considerations of large-scale web data collection (robots.txt, rate limiting, licensing)
Experience applying machine learning to crawl selection, extraction, or data quality classification at internet scale
Experience setting technical direction for a crawling, data acquisition, or search infrastructure team, whether or not that was your formal title
Experience designing systems for petabyte-scale storage and processing
Track record of open-source contributions to crawling, scraping, or data infrastructure tools
Background at a search engine (crawling, indexing) or a frontier AI lab's data acquisition team
Location: This role is based in San Francisco, CA.
Compensation: Depending on background, skills and experience, the expected annual salary range for this position is $350,000-$475,000 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.
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.
Thinking Machines Lab will consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with the requirements of the California Fair Chance Act, the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, and any other applicable state or local fair chance ordinance or law.
Skills Required
- 8+ years designing, building, and scaling web crawlers, scrapers, or large-scale distributed data-acquisition systems
- Track record of owning crawler or data-acquisition infrastructure at internet scale
- Strong software engineering skills in Python, Go, Rust, or a similar language
- Real experience with distributed systems
- Working knowledge of practical and legal considerations of large-scale web data collection, including robots.txt, rate limiting, and licensing
- Experience applying machine learning to crawl selection, extraction, or data quality classification at internet scale
- Experience setting technical direction for a crawling, data acquisition, or search infrastructure team
- Experience designing systems for petabyte-scale storage and processing
- Open-source contributions to crawling, scraping, or data infrastructure tools
- Background at a search engine or frontier AI lab data acquisition team
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.
