Research Lead, Tinker, Fine-tuning Science

Thinking Machines Lab builds AI tools that extend human will and judgment, including frontier models and customizable model-training systems. The Research Lead will lead the Fine-tuning Science team, set the research agenda for frontier customization and post-training techniques, remain hands-on in research, grow the team, and ensure findings are integrated into Tinker.

Responsibilities:

• Set the research agenda: choose the problems, place the bets, and own the roadmap for pushing Tinker quality, efficiency, and reliability to the frontier
• Lead and grow the team: hire, mentor, and develop researchers, and set the bar for experimental rigor and research taste
• Stay hands-on in areas like LoRA and parameter-efficient fine-tuning and how they interact with RL and post-training
• Improve the stability, efficiency, and reliability of large-scale fine-tuning and RL runs on Tinker
• Represent the work externally through papers, technical blog posts, and community contributions