Thinking Machines Lab
Software Engineer, Sandboxing
$300K–$400K
San Francisco +1 · On-site · Full-time · Posted Sep 22, 2026
- Location
- San Francisco
New York - Education
- Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in computer science, engineering, or similar.
- Visa sponsorship
- Visa sponsorship is offered; success is not guaranteed for every candidate or role.
About the job
Designs, builds, and operates secure sandboxing infrastructure for model-generated code and tool use, supporting concurrent executions across research and product systems.
What you'll do
- Build and operate sandboxed execution environments and improve isolation, balancing security, startup latency, and throughput.
- Develop scheduling, resource-management, and lifecycle systems for sandboxes under heavy concurrent load.
- Partner with researchers and product teams, and own platform observability, security response, reliability, and performance.
What they ask for
- Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in computer science, engineering, or similar.
- Proficiency in at least one backend language; the posting names Python or Rust.
- Experience building or operating isolation or virtualization technology.
- Grounding in Linux isolation internals, including namespaces, cgroups, seccomp, capabilities, and networking.
Nice to have
- Experience securing systems that execute untrusted or adversarial code, including threat modeling and sandbox-escape hardening.
- Familiarity with large-scale multi-tenant infrastructure on Kubernetes or similar systems.
Pay
$300,000 - $400,000 USD (base salary)
Tools
Python, Rust, containers, microVMs, Firecracker, Cloud Hypervisor, gVisor, Kata Containers
AI focus
Builds secure execution environments for AI models and agents to run code, use tools, and take actions.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative