Business Operations Lead

Thunder Compute; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary and meaningful-equ

Daily lunch, snacks, and coffee

Team dinners and events

401(k)

Health, dental, and vision insurance

Job summary

Thunder Compute is building a virtualization layer for GPU infrastructure and seeks a high-ownership operator to work directly with the CEO. You will tackle cross-functional challenges spanning strategy, operations, recruiting, finance, sales, partnerships, and company-building.

Expect broad responsibility, rapid prioritization, and ownership from problem identification to delivery as the company scales. This is a hands-on, deeply collaborative role at an early-stage startup.

Qualifications

• Exceptional organization and project management across multiple complex workstreams.
• Strong analytical reasoning with financial models and business analyses.
• Clear, professional written and verbal communication with diverse stakeholders.
• Ability to learn technical products quickly; coding experience not required.
• Owns projects from ambiguity to completion under tight deadlines.
• Strong judgment on prioritization and escalation.

Responsibilities

• Build and optimize company-wide operating processes, goals, and reporting.
• Drive recruiting from sourcing to offers and onboarding.
• Prepare analyses and materials for boards, investors, customers, and partners.
• Coordinate complex customer deployments and ensure timely commitments.
• Evaluate strategic opportunities, partnerships, markets, and new business ideas.
• Own financial models, budgets, vendor decisions, and operational planning.
• Turn founder discussions into clear plans, owners, timelines, and deliverables.
• Identify problems early and drive resolution to unblock growth.
• Take on important, undefined projects and bring them to completion.

Skills

Organization

Project management

Analytical thinking

Communication

Learning agility

Ownership

Prioritization

Job description

Company

Thunder Compute is building the VMware for GPUs. We have raised over $17.5M from Matrix Partners, Y Combinator, and leading angels from CoreWeave, Microsoft, Cognition, and Anthropic.

Deployed GPU fleets are currently only 5–20% utilized. Existing solutions generally optimize individual workloads, but they do not address the underlying infrastructure problem. We are building a general-purpose virtualization layer that turns GPUs into network resources that can be pooled and dynamically allocated across a data center.

Our technology allows companies to run more workloads on the GPU infrastructure they already own, without requiring developers to modify their applications.

We are a small, highly technical team building a new infrastructure layer for GPU computing.

Role

Your work will focus on helping the founders operate and scale the company. You will work closely with the CEO to take ownership of the most pressing operational challenges within the company.

This is not primarily an administrative role. You will work across strategy, operations, recruiting, finance, sales, partnerships, and company-building, depending on what is most important at a given moment.

Example projects may include:

• Building and maintaining company-wide operating processes, goals, and reporting

• Driving recruiting processes from sourcing strategy through offer close and onboarding

• Preparing analyses and materials for board meetings, investors, customers, and strategic partners

• Coordinating complex customer deployments and ensuring commitments are completed on time

• Evaluating strategic opportunities, partnerships, markets, and new business initiatives

• Owning financial models, budgets, vendor decisions, and operational planning

• Turning founder discussions into clear plans, owners, timelines, and deliverables

• Identifying problems before they become blockers and ensuring they are resolved

• Taking on important projects that do not yet have an obvious owner

You will spend your days bouncing between high-level company strategy and detailed execution. One week, you may be evaluating a strategic partnership or preparing for a board meeting; the next, you may be rebuilding a recruiting process, coordinating a customer deployment, or resolving an operational issue that spans five different parties.

This work is not easy. The scope is broad, priorities change quickly, and many projects will begin without a clear playbook.

We look for exceptional organizational ability, strong analytical judgment, high work ethic, and extreme attention to detail. We must move quickly while maintaining a high standard of execution.

Core Skills

• Exceptional organization, project management, and attention to detail, with the ability to manage multiple complex workstreams without losing track of details

• Strong analytical reasoning and structured problem-solving, including comfort with financial models, business analyses, and quantitative information

• Clear and professional written and verbal communication, with the ability to work effectively across technical and non-technical stakeholders

• Ability to quickly learn technical products, customer needs, and industry context; coding experience is not required

• Strong ownership and work ethic, with the ability to independently push a project from an ambiguous starting point through 100% completion under tight deadlines

• Strong judgment about prioritization, tradeoffs, and when to escalates issues

Preferred

• Experience at a top consulting firm such as McKinsey, Bain, or BCG; in investment banking, private equity, or another demanding analytical environment; or in an operating role at a high-growth technology company

• Experience working directly with founders, executives, or senior clients

• Experience managing cross-functional projects involving technical and nontechnical teams

• Strong academic performance and demonstrated quantitative ability

• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure, artificial intelligence, developer tools, enterprise software, or another technical industry

• Experience at an early-stage startup or evidence that you can operate effectively without established processes or large support teams

Why Join

You will join early enough to meaningfully shape how the company operates, sells, hires, and scales.

You will work directly with the founders and have visibility into nearly every major company decision. The role offers unusually broad responsibility and a short path between identifying a problem, making a decision, and seeing the outcome.

You will help build both the company and a new infrastructure layer for GPU computing.

Logistics

• You will report directly to co-founder and CEO Carl Peterson

• This role is full-time and in person, five days per week, at our office in downtown San Francisco

• Relocation support and visa sponsorship are available

Benefits

• Competitive salary and meaningful equity

• Daily lunch, snacks, and coffee

• Team dinners and events

• 401(k)

• Health, dental, and vision insurance