Tinkerer

Thinking Machines Lab • San Francisco, CA

1d • $300,000 - $400,000 • Onsite

About The Position

Thinking Machines is hiring a Tinkerer, a research engineer who builds its Tinker fine-tuning API by using it and helps the open source community build with the company’s products. The role combines technical research and engineering with substantial user-facing work. It involves engaging with developers and researchers, creating and maintaining code examples and recipes, adding library features, prototyping integrations, and translating user challenges into product improvements.

The Tinkerer will work across the open source community and the company’s research and infrastructure teams. The role contributes to post-training research and practice, shares learnings through technical content and public engagement, surfaces user patterns to inform product and infrastructure priorities, and helps shape Tinker’s developer experience and product strategy. The position is based in San Francisco, California.

Requirements

• At least 5 years of experience in developer relations, developer experience, or software engineering with significant open source or community-facing work.
• Strong software engineering skills, including experience writing and shipping production-quality Python code.
• Hands-on experience fine-tuning, evaluating, or deploying large language models, including supervised and reinforcement learning and tuning the hyperparameters of these algorithms.
• Ability to reason about model training, fine-tuning, and inference and credibly discuss tradeoffs between different approaches.

Nice To Haves

• Deep expertise in post-training LLMs on new domains and improving model capability, including reinforcement learning and agentic training.
• A track record of contributing to, maintaining, or growing open source software libraries, and interest in engaging with open source communities.
• Thoughtful understanding of developer experience, including developer ergonomics, onboarding flow, and common sharp edges.
• Experience writing public or internal code examples, tutorials, cookbooks, papers, or technical content that helps others understand and apply technical concepts.
• Comfort engaging publicly through talks, livestreams, academic research conferences, or meetup appearances.
• Familiarity with multimodal models, including text, image, and audio, and the tradeoffs involved in training, fine-tuning, and inference.

Responsibilities

• Write, test, and maintain code examples, recipes, agentic training pipelines, and documentation for Tinker and Inkling, including the Tinker cookbook.
• Work directly with open source developers and researchers to understand and debug technical issues, gather feedback, and optimize fine-tuning and deployment pipelines.
• Partner with research and infrastructure teams to translate community feedback and patterns into improvements to Tinker, Inkling, and future models, and develop new post-training recipes.
• Build tools, integrations, and demos that reduce user friction and make it easier to experiment with, adopt, and deploy Thinking Machines’ models.
• Represent Thinking Machines in the open source community through blog posts, guides, tutorials, livestreams, talks, and conference and meetup appearances.
• Contribute to and help maintain open source libraries by answering questions, reviewing contributions, and sharing learnings.
• Help shape Tinker’s developer experience roadmap, near-term priorities, and long-term product strategy as models and platform features ship.

Benefits

• Generous health benefits
• Dental benefits
• Vision benefits
• Unlimited PTO
• Paid parental leave
• Relocation support as needed

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed