HPC/ GPU Hardware Engineer

The San Francisco Compute Company; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Generous equity grant

Retirement matching

Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance

Unlimited paid time off

Daily lunch

Unlimited office book budget

Daily lunch

Unlimited office book budget

Job summary

A technology infrastructure company in San Francisco is seeking an experienced engineer to manage and operate GPU clusters. The role requires over 5 years of hands-on experience, a deep understanding of hardware systems, and a passion for automating fleet operations. You will work as part of a small team, participate in on-call duties, and support the development of a liquid market for GPU offtake with significant responsibilities. This position offers generous benefits and a collaborative work culture.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience with HPC or GPU compute clusters in production.
• Deep understanding of server hardware including GPUs and power.
• Comfortable debugging issues across hardware, OS, and networking.
• Automation of fleet operations (infrastructure-as-code).
• Strong documentation and runbooks for operations.

Responsibilities

• Deploy new environments and manage GPU clusters.
• Participate in on-call rotation and fix issues.
• Lean into automation for large-scale deployments.
• Mentor junior engineers and contribute to team culture.

Skills

Experience with HPC or GPU compute clusters

Understanding of server hardware fundamentals

Troubleshooting high-speed fabrics

Debugging performance and reliability issues

Automating fleet operations

Strong operational documentation

Mentoring junior engineers

Tools

Linux systems

Slurm

Kubernetes

QEMU

libvirt

RDMA tuning

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 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.

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 will have 5+ years of experience with hands‑on operating, supporting, 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 have experience troubleshooting high‑speed fabrics such as InfiniBand and/or RoCEv2 Ethernet

• 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

• Knowledge of distributed training performance (NCCL, GPUDirect RDMA, multi-rail networking)

Benefits

Generous equity grant

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

Visa Sponsorships

Yes, 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

We offer 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 employees

Unlimited 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]