{"id":1670121,"url":"https://alion.io/job/thinking-machines-lab-software-engineer-inference","title":"Software Engineer, Inference","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":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":400000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":400000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":true,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Edge AI","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Quantization","optional":true},{"name":"TPU","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-02T00:00:16Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-02","last_verified_at":"2026-10-11T00:22:15Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":9,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":9},"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 hiring a Software Engineer, Inference to own the reliability, scale, and efficiency of the systems that serve our models to real users. Our research and inference teams push the limits of model performance and serving efficiency; this role makes sure those gains reach production safely and stay up - powering Tinker's live, multi-tenant serving and the products built on top of our models.\nThis is a production-facing systems role at the center of the company. You'll be the bridge between cutting-edge inference techniques and the day-to-day reality of serving real traffic: rollouts, capacity, incidents, and everything that keeps a fast-growing platform online.\nWhat You'll Do\nOperate and scale the production inference systems that serve live traffic, including Tinker's multi-tenant serving platform\n\nOwn the rollout process for new models, model versions, and inference optimizations, ensuring safe, incremental deployment to production\n\nBuild and improve observability, alerting, and capacity planning so the team can detect, diagnose, and resolve production issues quickly\n\nPartner with inference and research teams to productionize new serving techniques without compromising reliability\n\nLead incident response for production inference issues, driving root cause analysis and durable fixes\n\nDesign for graceful degradation, failover, and redundancy so that serving stays resilient as usage grows\n\nManage capacity and cost tradeoffs for serving infrastructure as traffic and model sizes scale\n\nSkills & Qualifications\nMinimum Qualifications\nExperience operating large-scale, latency-sensitive production systems\n\nProficiency in Python and Go or another systems language\n\nExperience with observability, monitoring, and incident response for production services\n\nStrong understanding of distributed systems and how they fail at scale\n\nPreferred Qualifications\nExperience running production inference for large language models or other large-scale ML systems\n\nExperience with deployment and rollout systems, such as canarying, blue/green deploys, or feature flags\n\nExperience with capacity planning and cost optimization for GPU or TPU infrastructure\n\nFamiliarity with inference-specific techniques, such as batching, caching, or quantization, and their operational implications\n\nComfortable being on-call and leading incident response for critical production systems\n\nComfortable working with high autonomy in a fast-changing, early-stage environment\n\nLogistics\nLocation: This role is based in San Francisco, CA.\n\nCompensation: Depending on background, skills and experience, the expected annual salary range for this position is $300,000 - $400,000 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":3386,"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":"2026-10-02T06:35:42Z"}],"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":"2026-10-03T21:08:04+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)"],"filings_for_role_12m":7}],"liveness":{"score":88,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.884,"p_room":1,"age_days":8,"expected_fill_days":29,"reasons":["conf:1","velocity","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-10T05:45:15Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":400000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/thinking-machines-lab-software-engineer-inference","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/thinking-machines-lab-software-engineer-inference.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-11T04:17:19Z","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","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":2806,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":2194,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-10-12T00:00:00Z"}},"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-inference"},{"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-inference"},{"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-inference"},{"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-inference\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fthinking-machines-lab-software-engineer-inference"}]}