Software Engineer - Systems

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"—a contract to lease the cluster for a period before it’s built. Financing a GPU cluster is inherently risky, since margins are thin and volumes are huge. Lenders don’t want the risk that cluster developers can’t repay their loan, and cluster developers don’t want the risk of not selling their cluster.

Fixed-price long-term contracts help transfer that risk to customers. 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 compute but sell to customers on monthly subscriptions. If you mess up a purchase, it’s game over: a small shift in revenue growth could determine profit or bankruptcy. But what if companies could exit their contract by selling it back to the market?

Otherwise, as AI scales, compute becomes available only to those who can take on that risk. A two-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.

At SFC, we are building a GPU market which necessitates bringing the software functionality of the hyperscalers to GPU neoclouds. The work in this role spans provisioning and monitoring bare metal servers with our VM orchestration software, coordinating with our GPU marketplace to enable users to configure the VMs, networks, and storage running on their rented compute. This includes building a Linux OS image with our software tools, maintaining a tool to ensure that our golden image is consistently applied across nodes with per-data-center tweaks such as networking configuration, and helping design the API protocol and server that users interact with to configure VMs.

We primarily use Rust as it enables us to write code that operates at almost every layer of our system (from the web server to coordinating with the kernel and BIOS), but if you are familiar with a language that requires manual memory management (such as

C) and have experience with a higher-level language, you would also be a great fit.

• You know what virtual machines and containers are
• You are familiar with syscalls and can explain them at an introductory level
• You are familiar with writing multi-threaded, and ideally cooperatively scheduled, programs and the associated knowledge
• You are familiar with Linux file descriptors, or the equivalent in other operating systems
• Experience with control or event loops, and ideally RPCs

• You are familiar with what virtual and physical memory is (in the context of page tables)
• Experience with basic assembly
• Understanding of CPU interrupts
• Networking knowledge and the ability to explain how some aspects of packet routing work
• Experience with asynchronous Rust such as a cancel safety and its interaction with synchronous Rust
• Experience with kernel programming

• Generous equity grant
• Competitive salary along with equity in the company
• Visa Sponsor ships:
  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:
  Paid time off for biological, adoptive, and foster parents
• 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, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, military status, HIV status, family medical history, genetic information, 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.