Software Engineer - Cloud

San Francisco Compute Company

📍San Francisco, CA
Posted May 19, 2026

Job Overview

Position

Software Engineer - Cloud

Company

San Francisco Compute Company

Location

San Francisco, CA

Work Type

On-site

Job ID

li-4338877187

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
We’re looking for a high agency engineer to help build the compute delivery platform that powers our “offtake machine”. In this role, you will develop novel systems that integrate our compute market with the orchestration software managing virtual machines running on cutting-edge HPC hardware.

This role may be a good fit for you if…

  • You’re an engineer who cuts through ambiguity to ship fast.

  • You’re experienced in a systems programing language (C, C++, Rust)

  • You understand command and control patterns (control loops, reconciliation, state management.)

  • You've designed data models in SQL and implemented the corresponding APIs (gRPC, REST) that expose them.

  • You’re comfortable translating product ideas into design proposals and iterating on feedback.

Bonus points if…

  • You have experience with Rust

  • You’ve previously worked at or founded a startup

  • You have experience working on large-scale distributed scheduling problems

Things you might work on ..

  • Develop user facing APIs that integrate control plane primitives with our compute market.

  • Designing scheduling algorithms that translate marketplace contracts into hardware allocations.

  • Extending the interface between the orchestration service and hypervisor to support new virtual machine provisioning capabilities and lifecycle operations.

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 hiring@sfcompute.com

Compensation Range: $150K - $250K

Interview Prep

AI-powered insights to help you prepare

Key Skills

Required:
Preferred:

Practice Questions

💡Technical Questions (3)
  • 1.How would you design a scheduling algorithm that translates a marketplace contract for GPU compute into specific hardware allocations on an HPC cluster?
  • 2.When extending the interface between an orchestration service and a hypervisor for new VM lifecycle operations, what are the primary systems-level concerns you'd address?
  • 3.How would you design a SQL data model to represent a liquid market for GPU offtake, specifically tracking the relationship between original long-term contracts and the sub-leased liquidity slices sold back to the market?
🎯Behavioral Questions (3)
  • 1.Tell me about a time you had to cut through significant ambiguity to ship a feature fast. What was the situation, and how did you approach it?
  • 2.Describe your experience building systems that rely on command and control patterns, like control loops or reconciliation. How did you ensure state was managed correctly?
  • 3.Give an example of when you translated a complex product idea into a technical design proposal. How did you iterate on feedback?
🧩Situational Questions (2)
  • 1.A 2-person startup buys a month of GPU liquidity from our market, but the underlying hardware node experiences a fatal error 10 minutes into their run. How does your orchestration system handle this?
  • 2.You are tasked with developing a user-facing API that integrates our compute market with control plane primitives, but the product team hasn't yet defined the exact user flows. What do you do?

Resume Keywords

Make sure these keywords appear on your resume

RustControl loopsReconciliationDistributed schedulinggRPCSQL data modelingHPCGPU clustersHypervisorState managementAPI designStartup

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