Staff Design Engineer

Job description

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 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.