Software Engineer - Cloud

We're building the company which will de-risk the largest infrastructure build-out in history.

When people finance GPU clusters, the datacenters housing them, and the infrastructure powering them, they need "offtake" - meaning someone has signed a contract to lease the cluster for a period of time before its even built.

Financing a GPU cluster is inherently risky, since margins are thin and volumes are huge. Lenders don't want to take on the risk that cluster developers can't repay their loan, and cluster developers really don't want to risk not selling their cluster. As a result, risk is offloaded to the customer using fixed-price long-term contracts.

If you don't mitigate this customer risk, there's a bubble. This isn't SaaS anymore - application layer companies sign multi-year contracts for computer and inference, but sell to customers on monthly subscriptions. If you mess up a purchase, it's game over: a minor shift in your revenue growth rate might mean the difference between profit or bankruptcy. But what if companies could exit their contract by selling it back to the market?

Otherwise, as AI scales, compute only becomes available to folks who can effectively take on that risk. A 2-person startup in a San Francisco Victorian can't realistically sign a 5-year take or pay contract on $100m supercomputers. But they may be able to buy the month of liquidity that someone else sold back.

So that's what we make: a liquid market for GPU offtake.

We’re looking for a high agency engineer to help build the compute delivery platform that powers our “offtake machine”. In this role, you will develop novel systems that integrate our compute market with the orchestration software managing virtual machines running on cutting-edge HPC hardware.

This role may be a good fit for you if…

• You’re an engineer who cuts through ambiguity to ship fast.

• You’re experienced in a systems programing language (C, C++, Rust)

• You understand command and control patterns (control loops, reconciliation, state management.)

• You've designed data models in SQL and implemented the corresponding APIs (gRPC, REST) that expose them.

• You’re comfortable translating product ideas into design proposals and iterating on feedback.

Bonus points if…

• You have experience with Rust

• You’ve previously worked at or founded a startup

• You have experience working on large-scale distributed scheduling problems

Things you might work on ..

• Develop user facing APIs that integrate control plane primitives with our compute market.

• Designing scheduling algorithms that translate marketplace contracts into hardware allocations.

• Extending the interface between the orchestration service and hypervisor to support new virtual machine provisioning capabilities and lifecycle operations.

Team members are offered a competitive salary along with equity in the company

Yes, we sponsor visas and work permits

We match 401(k) plans up to 4%

We offer competitive medical, dental, vision insurance for employees and dependents and cover 100% of premiums

We offer unlimited paid time off as well as 10+ observed holidays

We offer biological, adoptive, and foster parents paid time off to spend quality time with family

We cover lunch daily for employees

You can buy as many books for the office as you want

The San Francisco Compute Company is committed to maintaining a workplace free from discrimination and harassment.

We make employment decisions based on business needs, job requirements, and individual qualifications, without regard to race, color, religion, belief, national origin, social or ethical origin, age, physical, mental, or sensory disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, civil union or domestic partnership status, past or present military service, HIV status, family medical history or genetic information, family or parental status including pregnancy, or any other status protected by law.

We welcome the opportunity to consider qualified applicants with prior arrest or conviction records. Our commitment to diversity includes hiring talented individuals regardless of their criminal history, in accordance with local, state, and federal laws, including San Francisco’s Fair Chance Ordinance and California’s ban-the-box laws.