Developer Relations Engineer

Thinking MachinesSan FranciscoCore Engineering

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Opens the official Thinking Machines careers page

Salary

$300K - $350K USD

Job type

Full-time

Posted

29 Sept 2026

Status

Open · checked 7d ago

About this role

Thinking Machines is currently hiring a full-time Developer Relations Engineer based in San Francisco, California. This role is a great fit for an experienced technical professional who enjoys writing code in an editor while actively engaging with a growing developer community.

Role Overview

In this position, the Developer Relations Engineer helps the open-source community build using Thinking Machines' core products, including the Inkling model and the Tinker fine-tuning platform. The role combines engineering, research, and community outreach. Responsibilities involve writing code, creating machine learning recipes, and representing the organization externally through writing, talks, and technical demonstrations.

Key Responsibilities

Author, test, and maintain robust agentic training materials, code examples, and technical documentation for Tinker and Inkling.

Engage directly with researchers and developers in the open-source community to troubleshoot issues, collect feedback, and optimize the deployment and fine-tuning experience.

Collaborate closely with research and infrastructure groups to translate community insights into tangible product enhancements and new post-training recipes.

Develop practical tools, integrations, and demos that accelerate model adoption and deliver user value.

Act as a public representative of Thinking Machines via blog posts, tutorials, livestreams, conference sessions, and meetup presentations.

Contribute to shaping the overarching developer experience roadmap as new features and frontier models launch.

Requirements

Minimum of 5 years of professional background in developer experience, developer relations, or software engineering focused heavily on community or open-source work.

Strong software engineering capabilities centered around writing and shipping production-ready Python code.

Practical, hands-on background evaluating, fine-tuning, or deploying large language models.

Nice to Have

Background in supervised and reinforcement learning fine-tuning of LLMs, domain-specific post-training, and capability enhancement.

Proven track record of growing, maintaining, or contributing to open-source software libraries.

Experience drafting technical cookbooks, internal or public tutorials, and educational content.

Comfort appearing publicly on livestreams, at conferences, or giving technical talks.

Understanding of multimodal models (incorporating text, audio, and image data) alongside inference, training, and fine-tuning tradeoffs.

Skills and Tools

Python

Large Language Models (LLMs)

Fine-tuning and deployment frameworks

Open-source tools and libraries

Salary and Benefits

Expected annual salary range of $300,000 to $350,000 USD, determined by experience, skills, and background.

Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision health benefits.

Unlimited paid time off (PTO) and paid parental leave.

Relocation support provided as needed.

Visa sponsorship available for qualified candidates.

About the Company

Thinking Machines builds artificial intelligence designed to extend human will and judgment. The company trains frontier models like Inkling—a massive Mixture-of-Experts transformer—and develops Tinker, a fine-tuning API that grants researchers and developers flexibility in customizing open-weights models.

How to Apply

Interested candidates should visit the official Thinking Machines careers page to submit an application for this position.

Skills and tech stack

Python LLMs Reinforcement Learning Fine-tuning

Questions candidates ask

What is the salary for the Developer Relations Engineer position?

The expected annual salary range is between $300,000 and $350,000 USD, depending on experience, skills, and background.

Where is this job located?

This full-time role is based in San Francisco, California.

What qualifications are required to apply?

Candidates must have at least 5 years of experience in developer relations, developer experience, or software engineering with significant open-source or community-facing work. Strong production-level Python skills and hands-on experience deploying, fine-tuning, or evaluating large language models are also required.

Does Thinking Machines provide visa sponsorship?

Yes, Thinking Machines sponsors visas and is committed to working through the visa process with the right candidate.

What benefits are included?

Benefits include comprehensive health, vision, and dental coverage, unlimited paid time off, paid parental leave, relocation support, and visa sponsorship.

Ready to apply?

The application is on the official Thinking Machines careers page.

Apply on company site