{"id":54749,"url":"https://alion.io/job/thinking-machines-lab-site-reliability-engineer-sre","title":"Site Reliability Engineer, Production","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":"DevOps","role_family":"DevOps","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","New York, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":300000,"max":350000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":350000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":true,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"LoRA","optional":false},{"name":"SRE","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":true},{"name":"PEFT","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-08-04T18:03:51Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-08-31","last_verified_at":"2026-10-18T04:08:26Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":74,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":74},"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\nWe're looking for a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to drive the reliability of Tinker end-to-end. You'll work alongside the engineers building the platform and research teams to make every layer of the system more robust and resilient.\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. Tinker is rapidly adding new customers, features, and novel use-cases. We’re hiring to grow the platform alongside the Tinker community.\nWhat You’ll Do\nDefine and own end-to-end reliability, from CI/CD flows to production observability and incident response.\n\nDevelop appropriate Service Level Objectives for distributed training systems, balancing job completion reliability and scheduling latency with development velocity.\n\nDesign and implement monitoring and observability across the full training path.\n\nDrive incident response for Tinker platform issues, ensuring rapid recovery, thorough incident reviews, and systematic improvements that prevent recurrence.\n\nHarden multi-tenant isolation and resource scheduling so that LoRA-based workload co-scheduling maximizes utilization without compromising reliability or data separation\n\nCollaborate with security teams to address production vulnerabilities\n\nSkills and Qualifications\nMinimum qualifications\nBachelor's degree or equivalent experience in computer science, engineering, or similar.\n\nExperience in distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, or site reliability engineering.\n\nProficiency writing software to solve reliability problems, including building tooling and automation.\n\nExperience with production incident response, postmortems, and systematic reliability improvement.\n\nStrong communication skills and track record of coordination across engineering and research teams.\n\nPreferred qualifications\nDeep experience operating production cloud services at scale (e.g., public cloud platforms, internal cloud services)\n\nBackground in distributed training frameworks and how infrastructure failures surface in training behavior.\n\nTrack record building checkpoint and recovery systems for long-running distributed jobs.\n\nExpertise in Kubernetes at scale: deploying, operating, debugging, and tuning clusters handling heterogeneous GPU workloads.\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 $300,000- $350,000 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":3455,"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":"2026-08-04T18:03:51Z"}],"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":7}],"liveness":{"score":10,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.359,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":73,"expected_fill_days":29,"reasons":["conf:0","velocity","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":350000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/thinking-machines-lab-site-reliability-engineer-sre","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/thinking-machines-lab-site-reliability-engineer-sre.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-18T05:17:07Z","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":8006,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-19T00:00:00Z"}},"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-site-reliability-engineer-sre"},{"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-site-reliability-engineer-sre"},{"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-site-reliability-engineer-sre"},{"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-site-reliability-engineer-sre\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fthinking-machines-lab-site-reliability-engineer-sre"}]}