{"id":1431457,"url":"https://alion.io/job/thinking-machines-lab-developer-experience-engineer","title":"Developer Experience Engineer","company":{"id":14382,"name":"Thinking Machines Lab","domain":"thinkingmachines.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/thinking-machines-lab","size_band":"501-1000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":null},"role":"Product","role_family":"Product","seniority":null,"employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":350000,"max":475000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":475000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":true,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"Jupyter Notebook","optional":false},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-29T01:14:22Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-29","last_verified_at":"2026-10-02T20:04:38Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":3,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":3},"description":"About Thinking Machines\nThe 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.\nAbout Tinker\nTinker is our fine-tuning API that empowers researchers and developers to customize frontier AI to their needs - opening access to capabilities that have previously been concentrated in a handful of labs. We manage the infrastructure while allowing Tinkerers full flexibility in training open weights models with their own data, algorithms, and for their own needs.\nAbout the Role\nWe’re hiring anengineer focused on developer experience to build Tinker while using Tinker - working hands-on with real users and turning their challenges into product improvements. You’ll write and update cookbook recipes, add library features, prototype integrations, and ensure users can customize models smoothly.\nThis role is a bridge between Tinker users and our teams. You’ll surface user patterns to guide product and infrastructure priorities, and share what you learn through blog posts, demos, and code examples.\nThis is a technical-first role with a major user-facing component. It’s ideal for someone who’s happiest in a code editor or Jupyter notebook, but who also enjoys talking to creative people. Tinker is flexible by design to empower novel and ambitious use cases for model fine-tuning - your job is to help them succeed.\nWhat You'll Do\nWrite, test, and maintain high-quality code examples, recipes, and documentation in the Tinker cookbook.\n\nWork directly with a variety of users to debug technical issues and optimize their fine-tuning pipelines.\n\nPartner with internal research and infra teams to identify and prioritize improvements to Tinker’s developer experience.\n\nBuild tools, integrations, and demos that reduce user friction and make it easy to experiment and deploy models.\n\nShare insights from the field through posts, guides, and talks.\n\nHelp develop Tinker’s near-term roadmap and long-term product strategy.\n\nSkills & Qualifications\nEnabling user success in building on top of an advanced platform is a skill that can be developed through many paths. You might demonstrate that you have it if you:\nExperienced with fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with supervised and reinforcement learning, and how to tune the hyperparameters of these algorithms.\n\nExperienced with developing software libraries, especially open-source libraries.\n\nAre thoughtful about developer experience, with clear ideas around developer ergonomics, onboarding flow, and sharp edges.\n\nAre passionate about engaging with open-source communities, whether by contributing code, answering questions, or sharing learnings.\n\nHave written public or internal code examples, tutorials, or papers that helped others understand and apply technical concepts.\n\nAre comfortable reasoning about model training, fine-tuning, and inference, and can credibly discuss tradeoffs between different approaches.\n\nLogistics\nLocation: This role is based in San Francisco, California.\n\nCompensation: Depending on background, skills and experience, the expected annual salary range for this position is $350,000 - $475,000 USD.\n\nVisa 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.\n\nBenefits: Thinking Machines offers generous health, dental, and vision benefits, unlimited PTO, paid parental leave, and relocation support as needed.","description_format":"text","description_chars":3713,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Parental leave","Unlimited PTO"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":true,"industries":["Multimodal AI","Foundation Models","AI Research Labs","AI Development Tools"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-29T01:33:15Z"}],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":3,"expected_fill_days":29,"reasons":["conf:11","velocity","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-02T05:45:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":475000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/thinking-machines-lab-developer-experience-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/thinking-machines-lab-developer-experience-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-03T00:01:42Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":21,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":4979,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-10-04T00:00:00Z"}}}