Director Operations

About Parasail

Parasail provides ultra-low-latency inference infrastructure for AI companies, sourcing GPU capacity from a global network of vendors and optimizing it for performance, reliability, and cost. We orchestrate and manage an elastic, multi-vendor GPU fleet to support real-time AI applications at massive scale.

We are hiring a Director of Operations to own our capacity strategy, vendor sourcing, utilization optimization, and the financial performance of our GPU fleet. This is a foundational role that directly shapes Parasail’s cost structure, margins, reliability, and ability to scale.

Role Overview

As the Director of Operations, you will lead GPU supply-side operations across multiple vendors, zones, and contract types (on-demand, short-term, committed use). You will ensure Parasail always has the right capacity in the right regions at the right cost — maintaining strong utilization while preserving a healthy reserve for demand spikes and vendor outages.

You will partner closely with Engineering on automations, fleet optimization, and monitoring tools, and with Finance/Product on pricing alignment and margin improvements. This role blends strategy, analytics, finance, operations, and vendor management.

Key Responsibilities

Fleet Strategy & Capacity Planning

• Own the strategy for Parasail’s vendor-sourced GPU fleet across regions and vendors.
• Build forecasting models to predict demand, burst behavior, seasonality, and reserve requirements.
• Determine the optimal mix of on-demand, committed, and short-term contracts to maximize flexibility and margin.
• Maintain capacity buffers to protect against vendor outages, degraded performance, or sudden customer spikes.
• Ensure utilization targets are met — strong, consistent usage without over-committing spend.
  
  

Vendor & Supplier Relationship Management

• Source, evaluate, and manage relationships with GPU infrastructure vendors and cloud capacity providers.
• Negotiate pricing, SLAs, commitments, contractual flexibility, and scaling terms.
• Build a multi-vendor redundancy strategy to minimize single-provider risk.
• Create vendor scorecards to evaluate pricing competitiveness, reliability, latency, responsiveness, and alignment with Parasail needs.
• Identify emerging vendors, negotiate trial capacity, and assess cost–performance tradeoffs.
  
  

Utilization Optimization & Operations Automation

• Track real-time utilization across the entire fleet; identify and address cost inefficiencies and idle capacity.
• Partner with Engineering to build and refine automations for capacity acquisition, scaling, rebalancing, failovers, and cost controls.
• Develop policies and processes for lifecycle management of vendor-sourced instances.
• Implement tooling and dashboards to monitor:
• utilization
• cost per GPU hour
• vendor latency / performance
• error/outage risks
• margin impact by contract type
  

Financial Modeling & Margin Optimization

• Model and monitor GPU unit economics: cost per GPU-hr, marginal cost, blended vendor rates, cost leakage.
• Partner with Finance & Product to align customer pricing with underlying vendor economics.
• Recommend improvements to pricing, contract mix, or capacity strategy to expand gross margin.
• Provide monthly/quarterly reporting on supply-side cost trends and margin performance.
• Identify margin expansion levers: renegotiation, shifting vendors, rebalancing contracts, automating scaling, improving utilization.
  
  

Cross-Functional Leadership

• Work directly with Engineering on fleet design, reliability, scaling automation, and cost controls.
• Collaborate with Product on pricing and understanding workload patterns.
• Support Sales & GTM with capacity availability insights for large customer deals.
• Advise leadership on strategic supply-side risks, mitigations, and opportunities.
• Establish the foundation for a future operations organization as Parasail grows.
  
  

Required

What You Bring

• 7 years in operations, cloud infrastructure, procurement, finance, supply chain, or vendor management roles.
• Experience managing cloud/HPC/GPU vendors or other infrastructure capacity providers.
• Exceptional analytical skills — strong modeling, forecasting, scenario planning.
• Demonstrated negotiation skill with technical vendors or cloud providers.
• Proven ability to manage costs, optimize margins, and improve operational efficiency.
• Strong cross-functional communication; able to partner with engineering and leadership.
• Comfortable in fast-moving, high-stakes, high-ambiguity environments.
  
  

Preferred

• Experience with AI infrastructure, GPU cloud platforms, bare-metal GPU providers, or real-time compute.
• Familiarity with utilization algorithms, workflow schedulers, or GPU orchestration systems.
• Experience building or using internal dashboards (SQL, Grafana, Looker, etc.) for capacity insights.
• Startup experience or background in high-growth, operationally complex environments.
  
  

Why Join Parasail

• Own a mission-critical function that directly drives Parasail’s economics and scalability.
• Shape the vendor-sourced GPU infrastructure strategy for one of the fastest-moving companies in the AI ecosystem.
• Work closely with a world-class engineering team building real-time AI systems.
• High impact, high visibility role with significant autonomy.
• Competitive compensation, meaningful equity, and a chance to build a function from the ground up.