Technical Program Manager, Pre-Training

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
Pre-training research involves many interconnected efforts across data, architectures, optimization, and training systems. Progress depends on giving researchers room to explore while helping those efforts come together.
We’re looking for a Technical Program Manager to work closely with our pre-training technical leads and help the research team operate effectively. This role draws heavily on your ability to: understand the work in flight, help researchers coordinate, identify where support is needed, and follow through on the decisions that move research forward.
You’ll develop context to understand what each effort is trying to learn, how it connects to other work, and what might prevent it from succeeding. You’ll help the team turn research priorities into practical plans and adjust those plans as experiments produce new information.
This is a hands-on role for someone who finds satisfaction in making a research team more effective. You should care deeply about how people work together, earn trust through curiosity and follow-through, and be comfortable taking ownership of work that does not fit neatly into anyone’s responsibilities.
WHAT YOU’LL DO
- Partner closely with technical leads. Help translate research direction into coordinated work, clarify priorities, and follow through on decisions so leads can spend more time on research and technical questions.
- Build a working understanding of the research. Stay close to ongoing experiments, open questions, and results. Understand how individual efforts connect and help useful findings reach the people who need them.
- Help researchers make progress. Identify blockers, unclear ownership, and places where people need context or support. Work directly with the team to resolve them.
- Coordinate across research efforts. Help sequence experiments, manage shared dependencies, and bring together work across data, modeling, training systems, and evaluations.
- Connect the team with its partners. Work with infrastructure, supercomputing, and data teams to align research needs with available resources and make upcoming requirements visible.
- Build useful team practices. Shape planning, research reviews, documentation, and communication around how the team works. Make it easier to share results, make decisions, and preserve context as priorities evolve.
- Help the team learn and adapt. Recognize when results change the plan, bring unresolved questions to the right people, and help the team act on what it has learned.
SKILLS AND QUALIFICATIONS
Minimum qualifications:
- Experience helping a research or deeply technical team execute complex, evolving work. Your background may be in research management, engineering management, technical program management, or a closely related role.
- Strong technical fluency and curiosity. You can understand research goals, engage with experimental results and technical tradeoffs, and ask questions that help clarify the work.
- Evidence of making a team more effective through your own contributions: resolving difficult dependencies, improving coordination, supporting technical leads, or helping people move from uncertainty to action.
- Judgment about how much structure a situation needs. You can establish clear ownership and useful working practices while preserving flexibility for research.
- Clear written and verbal communication. You help people with different perspectives understand one another and reach decisions.
- A collaborative, low-ego working style. You build trust, handle disagreement thoughtfully, and follow through on both small tasks and complex commitments.
- Comfort operating independently when priorities are changing and the path forward is still being discovered.
Preferred qualifications:
- Experience working directly with machine learning researchers, particularly on foundation models or pre-training.
- Familiarity with the lifecycle of research experiments and large-scale training runs, including their data, compute, and evaluation dependencies.
- Experience supporting a research team through growth or establishing its working practices.
- Prior research or engineering experience that helps you engage deeply with technical work.
We encourage you to apply even if your experience does not match every preferred qualification.
LOGISTICS
- Location: San Francisco, California.
- Compensation: $350,000-$450,000
- Visa sponsorship: We support visa sponsorship and work with candidates through the process.
- Benefits: Health, dental, and vision coverage; unlimited PTO; paid parental leave; and relocation support as needed.

Employment type
FullTime

Work arrangement
No