{"id":126853,"url":"https://alion.io/job/thinking-machines-lab-software-engineer-evaluation-platform-infra","title":"Software Engineer, Evaluation Platform / Infra","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":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"junior","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":2,"visa_sponsorship":true,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":false},{"name":"Post-training","optional":false},{"name":"Pre-training","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"React.js","optional":false},{"name":"Rust","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true},{"name":"Synthetic Data","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-08-26T18:15:33Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-08-31","last_verified_at":"2026-10-17T11:52:25Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":51,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":51},"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\nEvaluation is one of the most important pillars of building frontier AI systems. It guides research direction, powers experimentation, and helps us understand whether changes to data and training are improving the capabilities and behaviors we care about.\nTo support this work, researchers need a powerful, self-serve platform that makes it easy to author evaluations, run them or reproduce them reliably at scale, and extract insight from the results. The platform must support both standardized external benchmarks and fast-moving internal evaluations, many kinds of tasks and graders, and inspection from aggregate metrics down to individual model trajectories.\nIn this role, you will design and build this platform end to end. You will work across Python frameworks, data pipelines, APIs, and user-facing applications, and collaborate closely with pre-training, post-training, and applied teams to improve how we evaluate models and turn results into research decisions.\nWhat You'll Do\nDesign, build, and maintain the platform for authoring, running, tracking, and analyzing model evaluations that are critical in day to day work and model releases.\n\nWork across evaluation libraries, distributed backend systems, data pipelines, APIs, and user-facing applications to deliver capabilities end to end.\n\nBuild flexible abstractions for evaluation tasks, environments, graders, datasets, and model outputs without constraining fast-moving research.\n\nMake evaluation results reproducible and trustworthy through versioning, provenance, observability, failure recovery, and robust quality controls.\n\nPartner directly with researchers to identify bottlenecks and turn bespoke workflows into self-serve systems that work across teams.\n\nWork with Research Tooling, the engineering team behind Thinking Machines’ internal research platform.\n\nSkills and Qualifications\nMinimum qualifications\nA bachelor’s degree, or equivalent practical experience, in computer science, engineering, machine learning, or a related field.\n\nTwo years of post-grad work experience as a software engineer or ML engineer, exclusive of internships.\n\nHands-on experience building or maintaining evaluations, benchmarks, graders, or model-quality systems for large language or multimodal models.\n\nStrong software engineering fundamentals and experience building reliable, maintainable systems.\n\nProficiency in at least one backend programming language; we primarily use Python and Rust. We use React and Typescript on the frontend.\n\nExperience with databases, data pipelines, distributed systems, or other data-intensive infrastructure.\n\nComfort working across the stack and owning projects from initial problem discovery through deployment and operation.\n\nExperience collaborating with cross-functional partners and subject-matter experts.\n\nPreferred qualifications\nWe encourage you to apply even if you meet only some of these:\nA track record of building frameworks, SDKs, or developer tools with thoughtful abstractions and a strong user experience.\n\nExperience with distributed job execution, workflow orchestration, sandboxed environments, or large-scale data processing.\n\nExperience building polished, intuitive interfaces for inspecting complex data, comparing experiments, or debugging model behavior.\n\nFamiliarity with large language or multimodal model evaluation, including model-based grading, human evaluation, or synthetic data.\n\nExperience working closely with researchers to understand their workflows and turn rapidly evolving needs into durable systems.\n\nExperience at a startup or on a small team, building technically complex products end to end.\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":4565,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":2,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":true},"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":"2026-08-26T18:15:33Z"}],"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":18,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.502,"p_room":0.36,"age_days":51,"expected_fill_days":29,"reasons":["conf:0","velocity","win:tail","crowd:junior"],"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-software-engineer-evaluation-platform-infra","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/thinking-machines-lab-software-engineer-evaluation-platform-infra.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-17T14:19:34Z","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":19255,"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-software-engineer-evaluation-platform-infra"},{"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-software-engineer-evaluation-platform-infra"},{"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-software-engineer-evaluation-platform-infra"},{"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-software-engineer-evaluation-platform-infra\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fthinking-machines-lab-software-engineer-evaluation-platform-infra"}]}