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Thinking Machines LabThinking Machines LabSan Francisco, CA

Research Engineer, Infrastructure, Numerics

Designs and optimizes distributed training infrastructure for large-scale LLMs, focusing on low-precision numerics, kernel optimizations, and communication frameworks to enable stable, scalable trillion-parameter model training. Requires strong systems engineering, deep learning frameworks knowledge, and collaborative research mindset.

350k – 475k/yr
On-siteDevOps / SRE

About the role

What You’ll Do

  • Design and optimize distributed training infrastructure for large-scale LLMs, focusing on performance, stability, and reproducibility across multi-GPU and multi-node setups.
  • Implement and evaluate low-precision numerics (for example, BF16, MXFP8, NVFP4) to improve efficiency without sacrificing model quality.
  • Develop kernels and communication primitives that use hardware-level support for mixed and low-precision arithmetic.
  • Collaborate with research teams to co-design model architectures and training recipes that align with emerging numeric formats and stability constraints.
  • Prototype and benchmark scaling strategies such as data, tensor, and pipeline parallelism that integrate precision-adaptive computation and quantized communication.
  • Contribute to the design of our internal orchestration and monitoring systems to ensure that thousands of distributed experiments can run efficiently and reproducibly.
  • 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, electrical engineering, statistics, machine learning, physics, robotics, or similar.
  • Understanding of deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, JAX) and their underlying system architectures.
  • 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 in areas such as floating-point numerics, low-precision arithmetic, and distributed systems.

Preferred qualifications:

  • Familiarity with distributed frameworks such as PyTorch/XLA, DeepSpeed, Megatron-LM.
  • Experience implementing FP8, INT8, or block-floating point (MX) formats and understanding their numerical trade-offs.
  • Prior contributions to open-source deep learning infrastructure such as PyTorch, DeepSpeed, or XLA.
  • Publications, patents, or projects related to numerical optimization, communication-efficient training, or systems for large models.
  • Experience training and supporting large-scale AI models.
  • 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

PyTorchJAXDeepspeedMegatron-LmPytorch/XlaXlaBf16Fp8Int8Distributed Systems

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