Research Product Manager

About the Role

As a Research Product Manager (RPM) at Thinking Machines Lab, you’ll play a central role in driving complex, high-impact technical products and programs that span research, infrastructure, and applied. You’ll help turn ambitious ideas into reality by driving cross-functional efforts, maintaining momentum across projects, and creating clarity in fast-moving, ambiguous environments.

Your work will connect people, ideas, and systems to ensure that our most important research initiatives stay aligned, well-scoped, and moving forward efficiently. It’s for someone who thrives in deeply technical discussions, understands the rhythm of research, can abstract at high-level and get into the weeds, with the ultimate goal of helping the company execute at scale.

Note: This is an "evergreen role" that we keep open on an on-going basis to express interest. We receive many applications, and there may not always be an immediate role that aligns perfectly with your experience and skills. Still, we encourage you to apply. We continuously review applications and reach out to applicants as new opportunities open. You are welcome to reapply if you get more experience, but please avoid applying more than once every 6 months. You may also find that we put up postings for singular roles for separate, project or team specific needs. In those cases, you're welcome to apply directly in addition to an evergreen role.

What You’ll Do

• Drive and coordinate large-scale research products and programs, ensuring that complex projects are executed efficiently, transparently, and with scientific excellence.


• Translate technical ideas into actionable, well-scoped plans, defining milestones and keeping teams aligned across model development, data campaigns, infrastructure, and product integration.


• Collaborate across disciplines — from research and ML infrastructure to legal and business development — ramping up quickly on new domains as needed.


• Create and maintain compute and resource roadmaps, identifying bottlenecks, trade-offs, and opportunities to accelerate progress.


• Synthesize and communicate progress across diverse technical teams, ensuring the right people are looped in at the right time and that information flows smoothly across the organization.


• Support the integration of new technologies and research insights into production systems and product roadmaps, bridging the gap between frontier research and real-world applications.

Skills and Qualifications

Minimum qualifications:

• Degree in computer science, artificial intelligence, mathematics, physics, engineering, or similar


• Experience in research program management, product management, or similar

Preferred qualifications — we encourage you to apply if you meet some but not all of these:

• Masters or PhD in computer science, artificial intelligence, mathematics, physics, engineering, or similar


• Past experience at a frontier or academic research lab, contributing to research in artificial intelligence


• Past publications relevant to artificial intelligence or frontier models, with contributions to areas like evals, multimodality, human-ai interaction, post-training, pre-training, data, or other similar domains needed to conduct frontier AI research


• Ability to learn new technical domains


• Strong technical communication, written and verbal

Logistics

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


• Compensation: Depending on background, skills and experience, the expected annual salary range for this position is $175,000 - $475,000 USD.


• 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.