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San Francisco, California, United States
Onsite
Available
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.
This is a role for a legal strategist–not a gatekeeper. We're building novel financial infrastructure in a market that doesn't have a rulebook yet. Our General Counsel must be a first-class business partner in the room where deals get shaped, not a checkpoint they pass through at the end.
You'll be the team’s resource for strategic advice and tactical excellence. You need commercial instinct, real strategic judgment, and the maturity to know when to protect the company and when to lean in and get a deal done. We want a thought partner who negotiates contracts that close, balancing our interests with terms our counterparties can actually live with, not just papers that are maximally favorable to SFC.
What you'll own:
Set the legal strategy and keep it tightly aligned with where the business is going, not where it's been.
Be a strategic thought partner to the founders and deal teams: pressure-test structures, flag the risks that actually matter, and help make the call when the path forward is genuinely ambiguous.
Draft, negotiate, and close a wide range of contracts, including offtake agreements, partnerships, vendor deals, and licensing agreements, with a commercial, deal-making mindset that gets to "yes" without giving away the store.
Navigate a regulatory frontier that's still being written: AI sales restrictions, AML/KYC, potential future CFTC oversight, GDPR, and financial and data-privacy laws across jurisdictions.
Advise on corporate governance, fundraising, and investor relations, including equity and debt financing transactions.
Partner with product to build compliance in from the start and turn legal constraints into design decisions rather than last-minute blockers.
Own risk and crisis response, including litigation, regulatory inquiries, and disputes, with calm, decisive judgment when the stakes are highest.
Lead our engagement with regulators and stay ahead of the emerging law shaping this space, so we're anticipating and preparing for new challenges and opportunities.
Protect what we build: patents, trademarks, and trade secrets.
Set the tone for legal and ethical integrity across the company through tailored policies, training, and best practices.
Run external counsel and the legal budget with discipline and leverage.
Team members are offered a competitive salary along with equity in the company
Yes, we sponsor visas and work permits
We match 401(k) plans up to 4%
We offer competitive medical, dental, vision insurance for employees and dependents and cover 100% of premiums
We offer unlimited paid time off as well as 10+ observed holidays
We offer biological, adoptive, and foster parents paid time off to spend quality time with family
We cover lunch daily for employees
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.
