Software Engineer, Platform, Tinker

About the role

We're looking for a software engineer to own the platform systems that enable Tinker — billing and usage metering, permissions and access control, organizations and teams, data exports, audit logging, and the admin surfaces that tie them together. This role partners with everyone from product to legal, as every new feature, pricing change, and enterprise deal flows through your work.

Responsibilities

• Design the authorization layer across all products: RBAC, API key scoping, organization hierarchies, and permission boundaries.
• Own billing infrastructure end to end, including usage metering and aggregation, plan management, payment processing, invoicing, and revenue recognition support.
• Build and evolve the organizations and teams model: seat management, SSO/SAML, workspace isolation, and invite flows.
• Implement data export and deletion pipelines that meet enterprise compliance and data residency requirements.
• Build audit logging so customers and internal teams have clear visibility into who did what, when.

Requirements

• Minimum qualifications: Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in computer science, engineering, or similar. Proficiency in at least one backend language (we use Python or Rust). Experience with at least one of: billing/payments infrastructure, identity and access control (RBAC/ABAC, OAuth, SAML), or multi-tenant platform systems. Thrive in a highly collaborative environment involving many, different cross-functional partners and subject matter experts. A bias for action with a mindset to take initiative to work across different stacks and different teams where you spot the opportunity to make sure something ships.

Qualifications

• Preferred qualifications — we encourage you to apply if you meet some but not all of these: 4+ years building backend systems in production. Experience building billing or metering systems at scale (Metronome pipelines, usage-based pricing, invoicing pipelines). Familiarity with enterprise-readiness patterns: SSO/SCIM provisioning, audit trails, data residency, custom contracts, role hierarchies. Strong opinions on building correct financial systems — idempotency, exactly-once semantics, reconciliation. Experience with event-driven architectures or stream processing for usage metering. Background in security engineering or a strong security mindset (least-privilege design, secure defaults, threat modeling). Prior work at an AI/ML company, developer tools company, or API-first platform.

Skills

• Strong opinions on building correct financial systems — idempotency, exactly-once semantics, reconciliation.
• Experience with event-driven architectures or stream processing for usage metering.
• Background in security engineering or a strong security mindset (least-privilege design, secure defaults, threat modeling).
• Prior work at an AI/ML company, developer tools company, or API-first platform.

Benefits

• Thinking Machines offers generous health, dental, and vision benefits, unlimited PTO, paid parental leave, and relocation support as needed.

Pay

Depending on background, skills and experience, the expected annual salary range for this position is $350,000 - $475,000 USD.

Schedule

This role is based in San Francisco, California.