Staff Design Engineer

About San Francisco Compute

San Francisco Compute exists to give ambitious teams large scale supercomputers without taking on a catastrophic balance sheet risk. Most GPU clouds force you to sign long term contracts with no way out. If you underbuy, you miss the window. If you overbuy, you'll blow up with no way out. It's a desperate gamble that San Francisco Compute does not force you to play.

Originally, SFC was an AI lab that bought too big of a GPU cluster and was forced to sublease it or go under. Today, we build data centers, supercomputers, and then lease those machines on contracts that let our customers sublease. More than anyone else in the industry, we deeply felt the pain and fear of being forced to bet the farm with your neocloud vendor. To make it possible to sublease, we invented the first compute market and became the first one to offer physical settlement. That means we operate GPU clusters like a neocloud and derisk our customers like a market.

Customers buying GPU clusters don't want to work through a network of brokers. They want to transact with the folks that have the keys to the cluster and can own the SLA.

To keep the industry safe from unnecessary risk, SFC needs to scale fast. To do that, we serve financially motivated parties as a technical partner to build, operate, & lease supercomputers on their behalf. Basically, we help folks who want an economic return build GPU clusters on their balance sheet, but operated in full by us. That allows us to retain the technical control needed to operate a cloud, but scale fast like a market. SFC's ability to offer subleasing can significantly increase the levered returns for cluster owners. Our hybrid model out-performs brokered contracts or other "compute markets", who have to go through a network of counterparties to solve problems. It also lets us design custom solutions for our customers, like clusters deployed in regions next to your dataset or physical eval set or a large CPU fleet deployed colocated with your GPU cluster.

Our team includes senior & technical leadership from places like Lambda, Crusoe, Digital Ocean, AWS, and Hut8. Our CTO is the cofounder and former CEO of Voltage Park. In prior roles, our team has deployed 8GW of datacenter capacity & hundreds of thousands of GPUs. We've been described as having "the highest talent density in the space." If you are an honorable, gritty person with eyes wide open & good epistemics, who wants to see AI go right, we'd love to work with you. There has never been a more critical moment in history and it is up to us to shape it on behalf of those who come after us.

About The Role

We're looking to hire an engineer to build extremely high-fidelity, high-taste interfaces. Maybe you were a designer in a past life, but now write code. You'll raise the bar for visual and interaction quality across our product surfaces, working closely with engineering, product, and design partners. We care about people who can operate autonomously: understanding the business context well enough to make good tradeoffs without heavy direction, and growing into broader product ownership over time.

What You Will Do

• Design and build the high-fidelity, polished interfaces in our product
• Raise the bar for frontend craft, interaction design, motion, visual detail, performance under real usage
• Partner closely with product and engineering to turn rough ideas into shippable, delightful experiences
• Make sound architectural decisions for frontend systems that scale with the product
• Mentor other engineers on design sensibility and frontend craft
• Grow into broader product ownership, understanding customer needs, business context, and shipping end-to-end

Who You Are

• You have strong design instincts, but prefer to build rather than only spec
• You have strong opinions about product quality and can point to specific things you'd fix in products you use every day
• You've shipped genuinely complex frontend components - whether the complexity was technical (performance, real-time data, animation) or experiential (making something hard feel simple)
• You're energized by both the craft of building and by understanding why something matters to the business and its customers
• Deep expertise in a modern JS framework: React, Vue, Svelte, or SolidJS
• A track record of shipping interfaces with real visual and interaction craft - not just functional, but genuinely good
• Staff+ level ability to operate autonomously and make good judgment calls with limited direction

Nice To Have

• Experience shipping products end-to-end to external customers, and understanding how that work mapped to business goals
• Startup or early-stage experience, where you had to wear a product-thinking hat as well as an engineering one
• Experience in developer tools, infrastructure, or technically dense product spaces

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.