Principal Software Engineer - Networking

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

As a Principal Software Engineer - Networking, you'll be responsible for designing and operating the infrastructure that powers our global footprint of GPU clusters. Your scope will include system software, orchestration, and distributed automation. This is a software engineering role with an emphasis on the ability to design systems that dynamically integrate networking and compute at scale.

Key Areas of Impact

• Design and operate orchestration frameworks to manage tens of thousands of GPUs across Kubernetes, virtualization, and bare metal

• Develop automation frameworks for large-scale provisioning, monitoring, and fault tolerance

• Build distributed systems that can withstand node or cluster-wide failures

• Architect software-defined networking solutions that integrate with underlay switches and support scalable designs

• Collaborate with networking specialists to ensure fabric resilience, low latency, and scalability, leveraging routing protocols like BGP where needed

• Integrate high-performance distributed storage with compute and networking layers

About You

• Strong software engineering background, with experience building fault-tolerant distributed systems

• Comfortable with Linux internals, debugging, and performance optimization

• Exposure to GPU/HPC clusters

• Networking literacy: familiar with eBGP, VXLAN, RoCEv2, and InfiniBand, plus an understanding of how to design software systems that dynamically leverage these fabrics

• Strong automation, scripting, and documentation skills

Nice to Haves

• Go or Rust experience (3+ years)

• Deep knowledge of HPC fabrics (InfiniBand, Ultra Ethernet, RoCEv2)

• Experience with high-performance storage (WEKA, VAST, Ceph, etc.)

• Prior exposure to global distributed compute 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