{"id":1268957,"url":"https://alion.io/job/thinking-machines-lab-research-coding-agents","title":"Research, Coding Agents","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":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","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":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"JAX","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Post-training","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false},{"name":"TensorFlow","optional":false},{"name":"Synthetic Data","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-08-27T22:33:23Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-08-27","last_verified_at":"2026-10-17T11:52:25Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":50,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":50},"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 the Role\nThe Coding Agents team makes our models world-class at agentic coding - writing, debugging, and reasoning about code across long-horizon, multi-turn tasks.\n\nYou'll join a small, high-leverage team responsible for the recipes, data, and infrastructure behind coding capability gains in every model release.\n\nThe team owns the full coding post-training stack: synthetic and human data generation, RL environments and sandboxes, reward and grading design, and large-scale training runs.\n\nThis is a research role with real ownership - you'll shape technical direction, not just execute against a spec.\n\nNote: This is an \"evergreen role\" that we keep open on an on-going basis to express interest in this research area. We receive many applications, and there may not always be an immediate role that aligns perfectly with your experience and skills. Still, we encourage you to apply. We continuously review applications and reach out to applicants as new opportunities open. You are welcome to reapply if you get more experience, but please avoid applying more than once every 6 months. You may also find that we put up postings for singular roles for separate, project or team specific needs. In those cases, you're welcome to apply directly in addition to an evergreen role.\nWhat You’ll Do\nDesign and run RL training jobs targeting agentic coding capabilities, iterating on recipes and data.\n\nBuild and improve the sandboxed coding environments and reward signals that models are trained and evaluated against.\n\nGenerate and curate high-quality synthetic coding data, and build scalable, general-purpose data pipelines.\n\nDesign evals that measure real-world coding usefulness, and train models against them to deliver concrete improvements in day-to-day usability.\n\nDebug and analyze large RL runs to catch confounders, reward hacking, and other RL failure modes.\n\nCollaborate closely with infra, evals, and other post-training teams on shared data, joint training runs, and usability improvements - and ship the results into model releases.\n\nSkills and Qualifications\nMinimum qualifications:\nStrong engineering skills, ability to contribute code and debug in complex codebases.\n\nProficiency in Python and familiarity with at least one deep learning framework (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX). Comfortable with debugging distributed training and writing code that scales.\n\nBachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Physics, Mathematics, or a related discipline with strong theoretical and empirical grounding.\n\nClarity in communication, an ability to explain complex technical concepts in writing.\n\nPreferred qualifications - we encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet all preferred qualifications, but at least some:\n\nExperience building synthetic data pipelines and systems that were adopted by others on your team and remain in use today.\n\nExperience owning the end-to-end cycle of identifying gaps in model usability and closing them through custom evaluations and training data.\n\nExperience making large-scale agentic RL infrastructure reliable given the long tail of failures that surface at scale.\n\nExperience improving the coding capabilities of a frontier model.\n\nPhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Physics, Mathematics, or a related discipline with strong theoretical and empirical grounding; or, equivalent industry research experience.\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":4332,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"phd","optional":false},"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":"2026-09-25T23:22:17Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 30","filings_12m":30,"filings_prev_12m":8,"green_card_filings_12m":0,"median_offered_wage_usd":192500,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-15T11:24:14+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)"],"filings_for_role_12m":28}],"liveness":{"score":25,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":1,"p_active":0.548,"p_room":0.45,"age_days":50,"expected_fill_days":29,"reasons":["conf:0","velocity","win:tail"],"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":475000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/thinking-machines-lab-research-coding-agents","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/thinking-machines-lab-research-coding-agents.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-17T14:35:24Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":19619,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-18T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":14382},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=14382"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fthinking-machines-lab-research-coding-agents"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fthinking-machines-lab-research-coding-agents"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fthinking-machines-lab-research-coding-agents"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/thinking-machines-lab-research-coding-agents\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fthinking-machines-lab-research-coding-agents"}]}