Research Engineer, Developer Experience, Tinker
About The Position
Thinking Machines Lab is seeking a Research Engineer focused on developer experience to build and utilize Tinker, their fine-tuning API. This role involves working directly with users to understand their challenges and translate them into product improvements. The engineer will write and update documentation, add library features, prototype integrations, and ensure users can smoothly customize models. This position acts as a liaison between Tinker users and the research/infrastructure teams, surfacing user patterns to guide product priorities and sharing learnings through various channels. It's a technical role with a significant user-facing component, ideal for someone comfortable coding and interacting with creative individuals, aiming to help users succeed with novel model fine-tuning use cases.
Requirements
- Experienced with fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with supervised and reinforcement learning, and how to tune the hyperparameters of these algorithms.
- Experienced with developing software libraries, especially open-source libraries.
- Thoughtful about developer experience, with clear ideas around developer ergonomics, onboarding flow, and sharp edges.
- Passionate about engaging with open-source communities, whether by contributing code, answering questions, or sharing learnings.
- Have written public or internal code examples, tutorials, or papers that helped others understand and apply technical concepts.
- Comfortable reasoning about model training, fine-tuning, and inference, and can credibly discuss tradeoffs between different approaches.
Responsibilities
- Write, test, and maintain high-quality code examples, recipes, and documentation in the Tinker cookbook.
- Work directly with a variety of users to debug technical issues and optimize their fine-tuning pipelines.
- Partner with internal research and infra teams to identify and prioritize improvements to Tinker’s developer experience.
- Build tools, integrations, and demos that reduce user friction and make it easy to experiment and deploy models.
- Share insights from the field through posts, guides, and talks.
- Help develop Tinker’s near-term roadmap and long-term product strategy.
Benefits
- health benefits
- dental benefits
- vision benefits
- unlimited PTO
- paid parental leave
- relocation support
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
