{"id":1670122,"url":"https://alion.io/job/thinking-machines-lab-software-engineer-infrastructure","title":"Software Engineer, Infrastructure","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":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":true},{"name":"TPU","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-01T23:30:50Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-01","last_verified_at":"2026-10-12T11:21:17Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":10,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":10},"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, Infrastructure to design and build the distributed systems that power our model training and serving platforms. You'll work on the systems underlying everything we do - from the clusters that train our frontier models with Inkling, to the multi-tenant serving infrastructure behind Tinker.\nThis is a foundational infrastructure role at a fast-moving startup. You'll have real ownership over systems that run at large scale, and your work will directly determine how quickly our research and product teams can iterate.\nWhat You'll Do\nDesign, build, and operate distributed systems that support large-scale model training and inference across thousands of accelerators\n\nBuild and maintain core infrastructure, including orchestration, scheduling, storage, and resource management systems\n\nImprove the reliability, performance, and observability of infrastructure used across research and product teams\n\nPartner with researchers and platform engineers to understand infrastructure needs and turn them into robust, well-abstracted systems\n\nDebug and resolve complex distributed failures across the stack, from networking and storage to compute and scheduling\n\nWrite and maintain internal libraries and APIs, primarily in Python and Go, that other engineers build on\n\nSkills & Qualifications\nMinimum Qualifications\nDemonstrated expertise designing and developing large-scale distributed systems\n\nStrong proficiency in Python and Go\n\nExperience building, deploying, and operating production infrastructure at scale\n\nSolid grounding in distributed systems fundamentals, such as consensus, consistency, fault tolerance, and networking\n\nPreferred Qualifications\nExperience with ML infrastructure, such as training orchestration, job schedulers, or distributed storage and data systems\n\nExperience operating large-scale GPU or TPU clusters\n\nExperience with container orchestration (e.g. Kubernetes) and infrastructure-as-code\n\nContributions to open-source infrastructure projects\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":3009,"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":76,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.841,"p_room":0.9,"age_days":10,"expected_fill_days":29,"reasons":["conf:2","velocity","win:mid","comp:attention"],"computed_at":"2026-10-12T06:55:09Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":400000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/thinking-machines-lab-software-engineer-infrastructure","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/thinking-machines-lab-software-engineer-infrastructure.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-12T15:01:38Z","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":23723,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-13T00:00:00Z"}},"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-infrastructure"},{"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-infrastructure"},{"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-infrastructure"},{"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-infrastructure\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fthinking-machines-lab-software-engineer-infrastructure"}]}