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Thinking Machines LabThinking Machines LabSan Francisco, CA

Research Engineer, Infrastructure, Inference

Designs, optimizes, and scales infrastructure for high-performance AI model inference, focusing on latency, throughput, efficiency, and reliability. Collaborates with researchers to enable production deployment of large-scale models using deep learning frameworks and distributed systems.

350k – 475k/yr
On-siteDevOps / SRE

About the role

What You’ll Do

  • Work alongside researchers and engineers to bring cutting-edge AI models into production.
  • Collaborate with research teams to enable high-performance inference for novel architectures.
  • Design and implement new techniques, tools, and architectures that improve performance, latency, throughput, and efficiency.
  • Optimize our codebase and compute fleet (e.g., GPUs) to fully utilize hardware FLOPs, bandwidth, and memory.
  • Extend orchestration frameworks (e.g., Kubernetes, Ray, SLURM) for distributed inference, evaluation, and large-batch serving.
  • Establish standards for reliability, observability, and reproducibility across the inference stack.
  • Publish and share learnings through internal documentation, open-source libraries, or technical reports that advance the field of scalable AI infrastructure.

Skills and Qualifications

Minimum qualifications:

  • Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in computer science, engineering, or similar.
  • Understanding of deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, JAX) and their underlying system architectures.
  • Experience with inference serving systems optimized for throughput and latency (e.g., SGLang, vLLM).
  • Thrive in a highly collaborative environment involving many, different cross-functional partners and subject matter experts.
  • A bias for action with a mindset to take initiative to work across different stacks and different teams where you spot the opportunity to make sure something ships.
  • Strong engineering skills, ability to contribute performant, maintainable code and debug in complex codebases.

Preferred qualifications:

  • Experience training or supporting large-scale language models with hundreds of billions of parameters or more.
  • Understanding of distributed compute systems, GPU parallelism, and hardware-aware optimizations.
  • Contributions to open-source ML or systems infrastructure projects (e.g., SGLang, vLLM, PyTorch, Triton, DeepSpeed, XLA).
  • Track record of improving research productivity through infrastructure design or process improvements.

Logistics

Compensation: Depending on background, skills and experience, the expected annual salary range for this position is $350,000 - $475,000 USD.

Benefits: Generous health, dental, and vision benefits, unlimited PTO, paid parental leave, and relocation support as needed.

Skills

PyTorchJAXSglangvLLMKubernetesRaySlurmGPUTritonDeepspeed

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