HPC/ GPU Cluster Architect

San Francisco Compute Company; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Generous equity grant

Competitive salary

Visa sponsorship

Retirement matching up to 4%

100% medical, dental, and vision insurance

Unlimited paid time off

Paid parental leave

Daily lunch coverage

Unlimited office book budget

Job summary

San Francisco Compute Company is seeking an experienced professional to manage and deploy GPU clusters. You'll work to ensure optimal performance, participate in on-call rotations, and help mentor junior engineers within our team.

This role requires a deep understanding of HPC and GPU systems, coupled with a passion for automation and infrastructure as code. Additional perks include competitive salary and generous equity options.

Qualifications

• 5+ years experience with designing and scaling HPC or GPU compute clusters.
• Deep understanding of server hardware fundamentals.
• Comfortable debugging across hardware and software layers.
• Excited about automating fleet operations.
• Ability to mentor junior engineers.

Responsibilities

• Architect and deploy new GPU clusters globally.
• Participate in on-call rotation and fix issues as they arise.
• Lean into automation for large-scale deployments.
• Shape company culture and mentor junior engineers.

Skills

HPC or GPU compute cluster experience

Server hardware fundamentals

Performance debugging

Infrastructure as code

Strong operational documentation

Mentoring junior engineers

Tools

Linux systems administration

Schedulers and orchestration systems (Slurm, Kubernetes)

Virtualization technologies (KVM, QEMU)

Telemetry pipelines

InfiniBand and RoCEv2 Ethernet troubleshooting

Job description

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 it's 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.

About The Role

GPU clusters are some of the most performant computers on the planet. Even smaller clusters by today’s standards would have ranked in the TOP500 five years ago. Our infrastructure team is responsible for architecting and deploying new clusters around the world and keeping them running smoothly. You’ll participate in on‑call rotation, deploy new environments, fix issues when they arise, and lean into automation to enable deployments at scale. We’re a small but ambitious team so you’ll be an early contributor helping to shape culture, mentor junior engineers, and learn from our customers.

About You

• You have 5+ years of experience with hands‑on designing, architecting and scaling at least one HPC or GPU compute cluster in production (ideally >1,000 GPUs, but not required)
• You deeply understand server hardware fundamentals, including GPUs, NICs, PCIe, memory, thermals, and power
• You’re comfortable debugging performance and reliability issues across hardware, OS, drivers, and networking layers; full‑stack.
• The idea of automating fleet operations (provisioning, monitoring, remediation) excites you – you embrace infrastructure‑as‑code
• You appreciate, value, and generate strong operational documentation and runbooks
• You have the ability and willingness to mentor junior engineers and contribute to team culture
• You’re open to coming in to our San Francisco office 3–4 days per week
• You’re open to domestic travel when required

Some Nice to Haves

• Familiarity with data center operations including power, cooling, and colo/vendor engagements
• Strong Linux systems administration experience, including kernel drivers, RDMA stack tuning, and performance analysis
• Experience with schedulers and orchestration systems such as Slurm and Kubernetes
• Exposure to virtualization technologies (KVM, QEMU, libvirt)
• Experience utilizing telemetry pipelines for predictive hardware failure detection
• Experience troubleshooting high‑speed fabrics such as InfiniBand and/or RoCEv2 Ethernet

Benefits

• Generous equity grant
• Team members are offered a competitive salary along with equity in the company
• Visa sponsorships – we sponsor visas and work permits
• Retirement matching – we match 401(k) plans up to 4%
• Medical, dental & vision – we offer competitive medical, dental, vision insurance for employees and dependents and cover 100% of premiums
• Time off – unlimited paid time off as well as 10+ observed holidays
• Parental leave – we offer biological, adoptive, and foster parents paid time off to spend quality time with family
• Daily lunch – we cover lunch daily for employeesUnlimited office book budget – 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. If you require reasonable accommodation for any reason, please reach out to us at [e-mail].