Software Engineer, Inference

Software Engineer, InferenceThe 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.We'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.This 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.Operate and scale the production inference systems that serve live traffic, including Tinker's multi-tenant serving platformOwn the rollout process for new models, model versions, and inference optimizations, ensuring safe, incremental deployment to productionBuild and improve observability, alerting, and capacity planning so the team can detect, diagnose, and resolve production issues quicklyPartner with inference and research teams to productionize new serving techniques without compromising reliabilityLead incident response for production inference issues, driving root cause analysis and durable fixesDesign for graceful degradation, failover, and redundancy so that serving stays resilient as usage growsManage capacity and cost tradeoffs for serving infrastructure as traffic and model sizes scaleMinimum QualificationsExperience operating large-scale, latency-sensitive production systemsProficiency in Python and Go or another systems languageExperience with observability, monitoring, and incident response for production servicesStrong understanding of distributed systems and how they fail at scalePreferred QualificationsExperience running production inference for large language models or other large-scale ML systemsExperience with deployment and rollout systems, such as canarying, blue/green deploys, or feature flagsExperience with capacity planning and cost optimization for GPU or TPU infrastructureFamiliarity with inference-specific techniques, such as batching, caching, or quantization, and their operational implicationsComfortable being on-call and leading incident response for critical production systemsComfortable working with high autonomy in a fast-changing, early-stage environmentLocation: This role is based in San Francisco, CA.Compensation: Depending on background, skills and experience, the expected annual salary range for this position is $300,000 - $400,000 USD.Visa 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.Benefits: Thinking Machines offers generous health, dental, and vision benefits, unlimited PTO, paid parental leave, and relocation support as needed.