Thinking Machines Lab
thinkingmachines.ai
Actively hiring
AI Development Tools
AI Research Labs
Foundation Models
Multimodal AI
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Technologies
Salaries
Products
People
Growth
Offices
Jobs
Financials
Funding and backers
Team
501-1000
employees, estimated range
Hiring now
55
+19 posted in 30 days
Backers
7
Andreessen Horowitz, Accel
Momentum
39/100
hiring for its size, a new city, in the news
Last sign of life
this month
a posting or a news item
The story so fareach stage dated by its source: the company's releases, the press, registers, filings
Jul 15
On the Hacker News front page Inkling: Our Open-Weights Model · 1227 points
May 11
On the Hacker News front page Interaction Models · 334 points
Sep 29, 2025
On the Hacker News front page LoRA Without Regret · 184 points
2025
Founded
Tractionpublic signals, read monthly
Web presence
top 0.02%
of 133.2M domains by links, Common Crawl
Hacker News stories
43
best: 1227 points
Backed byfrom the funds' portfolios and accelerator catalogs
Andreessen Horowitz 
Accel 
GV 
Lightspeed Venture Partners 
Owl Ventures 
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Overview
Thinking Machines Lab is an artificial intelligence research and product company based in San Francisco and founded in 2025. The company develops multimodal AI systems and open-weights models, such as Inkling, alongside developer tools like Tinker for model fine-tuning. It operates as a public benefit corporation focused on human-AI collaboration and open science, supported by significant venture capital investment.
News
Thinking Machines Lab seeks $1b raise at $40b valuation - report
Investing.com -- Thinking Machines Lab is negotiating to secure at least $1 billion in funding at a pre-money valuation of roughly $40 billion, The Information reported on Thursday citing a person familiar with the matter.
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Report
LoRA Primer - Tinker Documentation
Documentation for Tinker, a training API for fine-tuning open-weight language models: SDK reference, cookbook guides, recipes, and tutorials.
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Report
Models & Pricing - Tinker Documentation
Documentation for Tinker, a training API for fine-tuning open-weight language models: SDK reference, cookbook guides, recipes, and tutorials.
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Report
Putting Task Expertise into RL Achieves State-of-the-Art Performance on Text-to-SQL
An expert-verified training set and a reshaped reward let RLVR on Tinker train a single model past human-level text-to-SQL accuracy, at a fraction of frontier cost.
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Report
A Safe Path to Open Weights
Abstract: Safe open-weight models are public goods, as they put AI development and safety work in many hands and make training choices inspectable. Open models also carry real misuse risks, and release is irreversible. To release safely, we must consider
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Report
Inkling-Small
An open-weights model that matches Inkling at a quarter of the size: multimodal, Mixture-of-Experts, with controllable reasoning effort. Fine-tune it on Tinker.
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Report
Thinking Machines Lab cofounder Lilian Weng steps down, citing startup-related stress and illness
Lilian Weng said repeated illness and the pressure of building an AI startup had become physically unsustainable.
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Report
Inkling Model Card
Model card for Inkling, a 975B-parameter (41B active) open-weights multimodal model: intended uses, model properties, training, evaluations and safety.
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Report
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Tech stack
Technologies named in job postings at Thinking Machines Lab over the last 12 months, by layer, with the share of postings for each.
Technologies in use
105
Postings analysed
68
Stack modernity
79/100AI adopter
Languages
Python65%
Rust32%
JavaScript7%
C++6%
Frameworks & libraries
PyTorch38%
JAX34%
TensorFlow24%
SGLang9%
Databases
Delta Lake3%
ClickHouse1%
Redis1%
DynamoDB1%
Cloud & platforms
Kubernetes28%
Linux13%
vLLM9%
CUDA Toolkit7%
AI & ML
LLM15%
LoRA7%
PEFT7%
ChatGPT1%
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Full Thinking Machines Lab tech stack
105 technologies · by team · pay by technology · changes · similar stacks
Salary insights
Compensation ranges based on this company's open jobs
Median
$400k
Typical range
$240k – $500k
Open positions
53
18
Jobs
Junior
11.1%
Middle
22.2%
Senior
16.7%
Staff
50%
| Level | Jobs | Median | Typical range |
|---|---|---|---|
| Junior | 2 | $350k | $350k |
| Middle | 4 | $313k | $275k – $500k |
| Senior | 3 | $350k | $350k – $360k |
| Staff | 9 | $360k | $275k – $500k |
Highest paying role
Engineering Manager
$500k
Normalized to USD per year
All salaries at Thinking Machines Lab
By role, level and city, against the market · 53 jobs with pay
Growth
Hiring Momentum
82/100
Scaling fast
Open positions
55
16 opened / 6 closed in 30 days
Median time-to-fill
26 days
faster than 47% of the market
ATS activity
Every ~4 hours
Today
Hiring Dynamics
+100%
Hiring Focus
The percentage next to each role is its share of the company's job openings over the last 90 days; the arrow shows the shift versus the previous period.
Backend
28% ▲
AI/ML
26% ▼
DevOps
10% ▼
Product
7% ▲
HR
7% ▲
Web3
3%
Actively hiring for Backend (+7 in 30 days)
Activity Timeline
Added TensorRT to stack
Oct 2026
Added TensorRT-LLM to stack
Oct 2026
Added A/B Testing to stack
Oct 2026
New location: Washington
Sep 2026
Added Recommender Systems to stack
Sep 2026
Added Machine Learning to stack
Sep 2026
Added Linux to stack
Sep 2026
Added Apache TVM to stack
Sep 2026
Added XLA to stack
Sep 2026
Added RLAIF to stack
Sep 2026
Added Speculative Decoding to stack
Sep 2026
Added KV Cache to stack
Sep 2026
Offices
Where the company hires and what each office is for
Cities
3
Hiring now
3
Countries
1
Busiest office
San Francisco
Loading the map
Headquarters
Builds here
Office with open vacancies
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San Francisco
United States
HQ
55 open roles 67 posted in 90 days 64% engineering 500-1000 est. staff $407k Avg Salary
hires for AI/ML, Backend, DevOps
New York
United States
Engineering / R&D
10 open roles 17 posted in 90 days 100% engineering 50-200 est. staff $381k Avg Salary
hires for Backend, DevOps, AI/ML
Washington
United States
1 open roles 1 posted in 90 days 1-10 est. staff $360k Avg Salary
hires for Public Policy
Jobs
$350k – $500k per year • In office • Full-Time • 3+ years exp • San Francisco
Python
Rust
C++
vLLM
CUDA Toolkit
Quantization
SGLang
TensorRT
TensorRT-LLM
LLM
CUDA
Speculative Decoding
KV Cache
DevOps
Kubernetes
Apply
$425k – $475k per year • In office • Full-Time • San Francisco
RLHF
Reinforcement Learning
JAX
PyTorch
DPO
PPO
Post-training
Reward Modeling
Machine Learning
DevOps
OpenTelemetry
Prometheus
SLURM
Kubernetes
Grafana
Robotics
Reinforcement Learning
Apply
≈ $213k – $448k per year (Estimated) • In office • Full-Time • San Francisco
Machine Learning
Apply
$300k – $400k per year • In office • Full-Time • San Francisco • New York
Python
Quantization
TPU
Edge AI
Apply
$300k – $400k per year • In office • Full-Time • San Francisco • New York
Python
TPU
DevOps
Kubernetes
Apply
$300k – $400k per year • In office • Full-Time • San Francisco
Multimodal AI
Analytics
A/B Testing
Apply
$300k – $350k per year • In office • Full-Time • San Francisco
Jupyter Notebook
Fine-tuning
Reinforcement Learning
Apply
$300k – $350k per year • In office • Full-Time • 5+ years exp • San Francisco
Python
Fine-tuning
Reinforcement Learning
Multimodal AI
AI Agents
Mixture of Experts
Post-training
Apply
$350k – $475k per year • In office • Full-Time • 8+ years exp • San Francisco • New York
Python
Rust
Machine Learning
Apply
$300k – $400k per year • In office • Full-Time • San Francisco • New York
Python
Rust
AI Agents
DevOps
Kubernetes
Linux
Cybersecurity
Threat Modeling
Apply
$350k – $475k per year • In office • Full-Time • San Francisco
Python
JAX
TensorFlow
PyTorch
LLM
Synthetic Data
Post-training
Pre-training
Machine Learning
Apply
$350k – $475k per year • In office • Full-Time • PhD • San Francisco
Python
LoRA
Fine-tuning
RLHF
JAX
PEFT
TensorFlow
PyTorch
Post-training
RLAIF
Machine Learning
Apply