What are the responsibilities and job description for the Forward Deployed Engineer - Full-Stack position at San Francisco Compute Company?
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.
The Role
The Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team works with SFC’s largest customers and partnerships to maximally scale them on our platform by bridging the gap between what our core product offers and what the customer needs.
In this role, you will work independently to unlock large enterprise deals by building creative, well-scoped full-stack solutions for our largest and most important customers. We work with the leading labs, startups and enterprises of the AI industry.
What You'll Do
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.
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.
The Role
The Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team works with SFC’s largest customers and partnerships to maximally scale them on our platform by bridging the gap between what our core product offers and what the customer needs.
In this role, you will work independently to unlock large enterprise deals by building creative, well-scoped full-stack solutions for our largest and most important customers. We work with the leading labs, startups and enterprises of the AI industry.
What You'll Do
- Be directly responsible for the technical integrations of enterprise customers by extending and configuring the core product.
- Run tightly scoped projects to build customer specific APIs and full-stack solutions on accelerated timelines.
- Maintain deep technical knowledge across the stack in order to make informed decisions about how the product can be extended and leveraged.
- Collaborate with other engineers to translate learnings from customer specific work into core product improvements.
- Collaborate with our GTM team to identify customer needs and craft solutions that bridge business strategy with engineering.
- Collect requirements directly and indirectly though customer engagements, sometimes traveling to meet customers.
- Serve as the primary point of contact throughout the customer lifecycle, building long-term relationships, advocating internally on their behalf, and proactively identifying new opportunities.
- You’ve worked on a core engineering team for 3 years and have shipped major projects end to end.
- You have high agency with an ability to navigate the ambiguity present in complex organizations.
- You’ve worked directly with a customer to iteratively ship something which delighted the customer with minimal scope.
- You’re experienced in a systems programing language (C, C , Rust.)
- You've designed data models in SQL and implemented the corresponding APIs (gRPC, REST) that expose them.
- You have experience building customer-facing web interfaces using React and Next.js or equivalent.
- You have previous exposure with HPC infrastructure and AI workloads.
- You’re familiar with Kubernetes fundamentals and could write an operator.
- You have experience with project management.
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.
Salary : $100