Software Engineer, Production Inference (Distributed Inference)

About the job

ABOUT THINKING MACHINES

The 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.

ABOUT THE ROLE

We're hiring a Software Engineer to build and scale the distributed production inference systems that serve Inkling, Inkling-Small, and Tinker in production. You'll own the systems that turn trained models into fast, reliable, cost-efficient services — from request routing and batching to multi-node serving and GPU utilization at scale.

This is a systems-heavy, production-first role. You'll work closely with research and infrastructure teams to translate rapidly evolving model architectures into serving systems that meet real-world latency, throughput, and reliability requirements, and you'll be on the front line when production inference systems need to scale, recover, or improve.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Design, build, and operate distributed infrastructure for large-scale model serving, including request routing, load balancing, batching, and multi-node coordination

• Optimize inference latency and throughput in production, including work on KV cache management, continuous batching, speculative decoding, and quantization

• Build and maintain high-concurrency serving systems with strong uptime, low tail latency, and deep observability

• Benchmark, tune, and extend inference engines to support new model architectures as they move from research into production

• Partner with research and infrastructure teams to translate emerging model designs into production-ready serving systems

• Build tooling for tracing, debugging, and resolving issues across the serving stack, from orchestration down to GPU kernels

• Participate in on-call rotation to support production inference systems

SKILLS & QUALIFICATIONS

• 3+ years of experience building and operating distributed systems in production

• Strong systems programming skills in Python, C++, Rust, or similar languages

• Experience with production infrastructure at scale: reliability, observability, and performance under real-world load

• Solid understanding of networking, concurrency, and distributed systems fundamentals

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Experience with LLM inference engines such as vLLM, SGLang, or TensorRT-LLM

• Familiarity with GPU programming (CUDA) or low-level performance optimization

• Experience with model parallelism, tensor/pipeline parallelism, or other distributed inference techniques

• Track record of operating large-scale production systems with strict latency and uptime requirements

• Experience with Kubernetes or similar orchestration systems for GPU workloads

• Contributions to open-source ML systems or inference infrastructure projects

LOGISTICS

• Location: This role is based in San Francisco, CA.

• Compensation: Depending on background, skills and experience, the expected annual salary range for this position is $350,000 - $500,000 USD (placeholder — verify against current internal bands before publishing).

• 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.