Technical Program Manager, Pre-Training

Thinking Machines Lab•San Francisco, CA

21h•$350,000 - $450,000

About The Position

Thinking Machines is seeking a Technical Program Manager to work closely with pre-training technical leads and help the research team operate effectively. The role involves understanding ongoing research efforts across data, architectures, optimization, and training systems; helping researchers coordinate; identifying where support is needed; and following through on decisions that move research forward. The Technical Program Manager will develop context on what each effort aims to learn, how it connects to other work, and what could prevent it from succeeding. They will help turn research priorities into practical plans and adapt those plans as experiments produce new information. This is a hands-on role focused on making a research team more effective through curiosity, trust, follow-through, and ownership of work that may fall outside clearly defined responsibilities.

Requirements

Experience helping a research or deeply technical team execute complex, evolving work; relevant backgrounds may include research management, engineering management, technical program management, or a closely related role.
Strong technical fluency and curiosity, including the ability to understand research goals, engage with experimental results and technical tradeoffs, and ask clarifying questions.
Evidence of making a team more effective through personal contributions, such as resolving difficult dependencies, improving coordination, supporting technical leads, or helping people move from uncertainty to action.
Judgment about how much structure a situation needs, including the ability to establish clear ownership and useful working practices while preserving flexibility for research.
Clear written and verbal communication, including helping people with different perspectives understand one another and reach decisions.
Collaborative, low-ego working style; ability to build trust, handle disagreement thoughtfully, and follow through on small tasks and complex commitments.
Comfort operating independently when priorities are changing and the path forward is still being discovered.

Nice To Haves

Experience working directly with machine learning researchers, particularly on foundation models or pre-training.
Familiarity with the lifecycle of research experiments and large-scale training runs, including data, compute, and evaluation dependencies.
Experience supporting a research team through growth or establishing its working practices.
Prior research or engineering experience that supports deep engagement with technical work.

Responsibilities

Partner with technical leads to translate research direction into coordinated work, clarify priorities, and follow through on decisions.
Build an understanding of ongoing experiments, open questions, and results, and help relevant findings reach the people who need them.
Identify blockers, unclear ownership, and places where researchers need context or support, and work with the team to resolve them.
Coordinate across research efforts by sequencing experiments, managing shared dependencies, and bringing together work across data, modeling, training systems, and evaluations.
Connect research teams with infrastructure, supercomputing, and data teams to align research needs with available resources and make upcoming requirements visible.
Shape planning, research reviews, documentation, and communication practices to support sharing results, making decisions, and preserving context as priorities evolve.
Recognize when results change the plan, bring unresolved questions to the right people, and help the team act on what it has learned.