Head of Compute

Prime Intellect, Inc.

San Francisco (CA)

Hybrid

USD 120,000 - 180,000

Full time

14 days+

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Benefits offered by this job

Competitive Cash Compensation

Meaningful equity

Flexible work arrangements

Visa sponsorship

Professional development budget

Team off-sites and conferences

Job summary

Prime Intellect, Inc. seeks a Compute Strategy Lead to oversee GPU sourcing, economics, and contracts. This role involves shaping the industry by negotiating substantial agreements and collaborating with research teams on compute requirements. Key qualifications include strong business instincts, deep understanding of AI compute markets, and proven negotiation skills. The position offers flexible work arrangements, competitive compensation, and professional development opportunities in San Francisco.

Qualifications

Comfortable with understanding unit economics and capital allocation.
Ability to track market dynamics and provider reliability.
Strong negotiation skills for high-value contracts.

Responsibilities

Own economics of compute end-to-end and partner on capital strategy.
Negotiate reserved capacity agreements and secure early access to accelerators.
Work with research teams to define compute requirements.
Track pricing and availability across global markets.
Advise leadership on strategic bets regarding providers and geographies.

Skills

Business and financial instincts

Fluency in global AI compute market

Technical understanding

Negotiation and contract management

Cross-functional collaboration

High ownership and initiative

AI-native skills

Job description

Building Open Superintelligence Infrastructure

Prime Intellect is building the open superintelligence stack — from frontier agentic models to the infra that enables anyone to create, train, and deploy them. We aggregate and orchestrate global compute into a single control plane and pair it with the full RL post‑training stack: environments, secure sandboxes, verifiable evals, and our async RL trainer. We enable researchers, startups and enterprises to run end‑to‑end reinforcement learning at frontier scale, adapting models to real tools, workflows, and deployment contexts.

We recently raised $15mm in funding (total of $20mm raised) led by Founders Fund, with participation from Menlo Ventures and prominent angels including Andrej Karpathy (Eureka AI, Tesla, OpenAI), Tri Dao (Together AI), Dylan Patel (SemiAnalysis), Clem Delangue (Huggingface), Emad Mostaque (Stability AI) and many others.

Your Role

You will own compute at Prime Intellect - the sourcing, economics, contracting, and strategic positioning of the GPU supply that powers everything we train, serve, and sell.

This is one of the most consequential roles at the company, and one of the most consequential compute roles in the industry. Compute is our product, and compute is the constraint that shapes what the open AI ecosystem can do. Every frontier lab is fighting for the same GPUs; your job is to make sure the open ecosystem has a leading seat at the table.

The decisions you make will shape the industry. Which neoclouds get the capital and commitments to scale. Which geographies become meaningful compute hubs. Which hardware generations get broad access versus staying locked inside closed labs. Which open models are economically possible to train and serve. You'll co‑design the compute layer of the open model ecosystem alongside our research and engineering teams — deciding, together, what we train, on what, where, and at what cost structure.

You'll work directly with leadership team and founders of the neoclouds reshaping global compute, and with the research and engineering teams pushing the frontier of open post‑training. You'll structure the commercial relationships that define the next several years of AI infrastructure, get first access to the latest generations of accelerators as they come online, and build the financial and operational architecture that turns a fragmented global supply market into Prime Intellect's durable advantage.

You need to be as comfortable modeling the unit economics of a three‑year GB200 commitment against a volatile spot market as you are sitting with our research team to understand what an upcoming training run actually needs, or negotiating a nine‑figure reserved capacity agreement with neocloud leadership.

Responsibilities

Compute Strategy & Economics

Own the economics of compute end‑to‑end: the unit economics of every contract, the margin architecture across training and inference products, the long‑term P&L consequences of today's supply bets
Partner with Finance and leadership on capital strategy — how much to commit, to whom, for how long, on which hardware, with what balance sheet exposure
Build the frameworks that turn supply decisions into clear financial outcomes, and that let us make multi‑hundred‑million‑dollar bets with conviction under uncertainty
Shape the commercial architecture of the open compute ecosystem: how committed capacity, spot markets, credit structures, and partner economics fit together

Sourcing & Contracting

Own end‑to‑end procurement of GPU capacity globally — across hyperscalers, tier‑one neoclouds, regional operators, and emerging providers in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia
Negotiate and close reserved capacity agreements, spot and burst arrangements, MSAs, DPAs, and order forms at nine‑ and ten‑figure scale
Secure early access to the latest generations of accelerators (B200, GB200, and what comes next) — in the quantities we need, before our competitors
Build and maintain the senior relationships that make Prime Intellect the partner of choice for providers deciding where to allocate scarce capacity

Co‑Design with Research & Engineering

Work closely with our research team to translate training roadmaps, RL workloads, and open model ambitions into concrete compute requirements — and back the other way, to surface what's possible given the supply we can secure
Partner with Engineering on acceptance testing, goodput validation, and the technical qualification of new providers and hardware
Sit at the table where the biggest calls get made: which open models we train, which customers we serve, which bets are worth the capital

Market Intelligence & Positioning

Track pricing, availability, and provider dynamics continuously across every major global market
Serve as the internal source of truth on the compute market — who's credible, who's mispriced, where supply is about to tighten, which providers will still exist in 18 months, where the next wave of capacity is coming online
Advise leadership on the strategic bets that define the company: which accelerators, which providers, which geographies, which contract structures, which moments to lean in hard

What We're Looking For

Strong business and financial instincts — you think natively in unit economics, margin structure, and capital allocation, and you can model the long‑term P&L consequences of complex supply decisions
Deep fluency in the global AI compute market: you know the providers, the hardware generations and their real tradeoffs, the pricing dynamics, and where the market is going over the next 12–24 months
Enough technical understanding to be dangerous — you can push back on a vendor's spec sheet, read a cluster topology diagram, understand why two nominally identical clusters deliver different goodput, and have a real conversation with researchers about what their workloads need
Serious commercial chops: you've negotiated and closed contracts at meaningful scale, know how to find and use leverage, and understand how deal structure drives downstream economics
Comfortable operating at the intersection of finance, commercial, product, and engineering — and translating fluently between all of them
High ownership: you see gaps and build the fix before anyone asks
AI‑native in how you work: you use LLMs, automation, and programmatic tools to move faster

What We Offer