Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, and operate scalable, fault-tolerant infrastructure for LLM Research: distributed compute, data orchestration, and storage across modalities.
• Develop high-throughput systems for data ingestion, processing, and transformation — including training data catalogs, deduplication, quality checks, and search.
• Build systems for traceability, reproducibility, and robust quality control at every stage of the data lifecycle.
• Implement and maintain monitoring and alerting to support platform reliability and performance.
• Collaborate with research teams to unlock new features, improve data quality, and accelerate training cycles.

Skills and Qualifications

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in computer science, engineering, or similar.
• Proficiency in at least one backend language (we use Python or Rust).
• Are fluent in distributed compute frameworks such as Apache Spark or Ray.
• Are deeply familiar with cloud infrastructure, data lake architectures, and batch and streaming pipelines.
• Comfort operating across the stack and owning projects end-to-end.
• 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.

Preferred qualifications:

• Have hands-on experience with Kafka, dbt, Terraform, and Airflow.
• Have experience building a web crawler.
• Have extensive experience understanding and scaling deduplication, data mining, and search.
• Have strong knowledge of file formats and storage systems (e.g., Parquet, Delta Lake, etc.) and how they impact performance and scalability.
• Are proactive about documentation, testing, and empowering your teammates with good tooling.

Logistics

Compensation: Depending on background, skills and experience, the expected annual salary range for this position is $350,000 - $475,000 USD. Benefits: Thinking Machines offers generous health, dental, and vision benefits, unlimited PTO, paid parental leave, and relocation support as needed.