Hardware Lab Manager

United States Digital Space LLC; New York, San Francisco (NY, CA); On-site; USD 320,000 - 405,000; Full time

Job summary

United States Digital Space LLC is seeking a hands-on Lab Manager to own and scale our hardware labs in San Francisco. You will oversee receiving, staging, cabling, power, cooling, and access, ensuring labs are functional and ready to support multiple teams and projects.

You’ll work with vendors, electricians, and engineers, build playbooks and tooling, and shape the lab from its current state to larger future labs, while maintaining security and inventory discipline.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience running a hardware, datacenter, or lab environment (rack-and-stack, cabling, power distribution).
• Knowledge of server hardware management planes (BMC/IPMI/Redfish), BIOS/UEFI, and firmware updates.
• Linux networking basics (VLANs, DHCP, DNS) to bring machines to usable state.
• Experience managing vendors, contractors, quotes, and freight for physical equipment.
• Comfort with power tools, bench supplies, and wiring diagrams; ability to read rack elevations.

Responsibilities

• Run the physical lab across sites: receiving, staging, cabling, power distribution, cooling, floor layout.
• Bring up new servers and accelerators from crate to SSH-ready state (BIOS/firmware, OOB, OS, network).
• Own hardware procurement: forecast, quotes, lead times, inventory.
• Own end-to-end RMA processes for lab hardware: triage, swap, ship, track, close; escalate to vendors as needed.
• Build and maintain lab setups: debug harnesses, remote power, console access, ad-hoc fixes for hardware out of spec.
• Oversee on-site contractors: scope, dispatch, quality validation.
• Handle physical access, asset auditing, lifecycle tracking for expensive/pre-release hardware.
• Document operations: playbooks and lightweight tooling for remote teams to operate lab without constant support.

Skills

Lab management

Hardware labs

BMC/IPMI/Redfish

Linux networking

Vendor management

Power tools safety

Independent work

Communication

Ambiguity tolerance

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

NetBox

ServiceNow

DCIM tooling

Job description

About the company

the company’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.

About the Team

Foragers is a new Field Services team within our physical infrastructure organization. We're the boots on the ground for the company's physical infrastructure: the people who get hardware into racks, gear commissioned, and sites handed over. The team is being stood up now, so early hires shape how we operate. This role is the lab-focused counterpart to our traveling field engineers. Instead of covering sites across the country, you own our Bay Area hardware labs from end to end.

About the Role

Your mission is to ensure our hardware labs are functional, useful, and ready to support the growing number of teams and projects that need access to physical hardware. You’d own what shows up, how it’s powered, cooled, cabled, tracked, set up, and made functional. This includes both standard hardware (think typical accelerator setups) and more specialized ones like ensuring our security teams have access to all the right headers and other hardware instrumentation on the machines.

Understanding and anticipating the needs of the various teams that rely on the labs will be another critical part of this role. You’ll be expected to take a lot of ownership and initiative over the lab and what’s in it, including reaching out to partner teams to figure out what they’d need in the future and making sure it’s there before it starts to block them. This will require you to collaborate closely with those partner teams, so a breadth of knowledge around hardware is extremely useful.

You’d be the first dedicated lab manager, so part of this role will include shaping it to scale from our current lab to much larger ones.

What You’ll Do

• Run the physical lab across both sites: receiving and staging, rack-and-stack, cabling, power distribution and load planning, cooling, floor layout

• Bring up new server and accelerator platforms as they arrive, from crate to a machine someone can SSH into: firmware and BIOS/UEFI setup, out-of-band management, OS install, network provisioning

• Own hardware procurement for the lab: work with teams on what's coming, order ahead of need, chase quotes and lead times, keep receiving and inventory in order

• Own RMA processes end-to-end for lab hardware: triage, swap, ship, track, close; drive vendor escalations

• Build the one-off setups engineers ask for: debug and programming harnesses (JTAG/SWD/UART), remote power switching, console and KVM access, and the occasional improvised fix for hardware running outside the conditions it was designed for

• Oversee smarthands and contractor work on-site (electricians, cabling crews, riggers, integrators, OEM field engineers): scope it, dispatch it, validate the quality

• Handle physical access, asset auditing, and lifecycle tracking for hardware that is expensive and sometimes pre-release

• Write it down: build the playbooks and lightweight tooling (inventory, remote power, console access) so remote teams can use the lab without pinging you for every step

Who You Are

• Hands-on experience running a hardware, systems, or datacenter lab, or a similar physical compute environment: rack-and-stack, copper and fiber cabling, power distribution (PDUs, circuits, phase balancing)

• Working knowledge of server hardware and its management plane: BMC/IPMI/Redfish, BIOS/UEFI configuration, serial console, PXE/network boot, firmware updates

• Enough Linux and networking (VLANs, DHCP, DNS, basic switch config) to take a bare machine to a state a remote engineer can use

• Have managed vendors, contractors, quotes, and freight for physical equipment

• Comfortable and safe with power tools, bench power supplies, and a wiring or rack elevation diagram

• Work independently with minimal supervision , and know when to ask

• Bias toward action and comfort with ambiguity: you'd rather move and adjust than wait for perfect information

• Communicate clearly and directly, especially when flagging risks or blockers

Strong Candidates May Also Have

• Stood up a lab or datacenter room from empty: layout, power and cooling budget, first round of purchasing

• Time around high-density accelerator systems (GPU/TPU-class racks), liquid cooling, or pre-release/NPI hardware bring-up

• Electronics bench skills: soldering and rework, scope and multimeter, custom cable and debug harnesses, JTAG probes, light fabrication (3D printing, drilling, mounting)

• Supported hardware security, firmware, or platform bring-up work

• Experience with DCIM or asset-management tooling (NetBox, ServiceNow, etc.)

• Bought hard-to-source or specialty hardware and dealt with the compliance and logistics that come with it

Location

This role is based in our San Francisco office (500 Howard St). Travel to nearby lab spaces is required so expect to be in-office more frequently than the company's standard 25% hybrid baseline.

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

Annual Salary:

$320,000—$405,000 USD

LogisticsMinimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience

Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience

Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position

Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.

Visa sponsorship:We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.

Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed. Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.

Your safety matters to us.