Head of Infrastructure
General Compute
San Francisco, CA · Posted October 29, 2026
Just laid off? Start here: a plan for the first weeks
Want recruiters in Engineering to be able to find you?
Roles at this level, like this one at General Compute, are often filled through recruiters.
See every open role at General Compute
More in California job market · Technology & Software · Engineering jobs
More roles at General Compute
- Head of Data Center Deployment · San Francisco, CA
- Network Engineer · San Francisco, CA
- Platform Engineer · San Francisco, CA
- Head of Capital Markets · San Francisco, CA
- Social & Community Lead · San Francisco, CA
- Model Bring-up Engineer / ML Compiler Engineer · San Francisco, CA
Similar jobs
- Head of Technical Support · Resolve AI · San Francisco, CA
- Senior Manager, Software Engineering · Walmart · Sunnyvale, CA
- Senior Project Manager-Architecture · Dewberry · Sacramento, CA
- Director of Applications, Building Technology, Security & Enterprise Badge Service · Sutter Health · Sacramento, CA
- Manager, Data Engineering · Insulet · San Diego, CA
- Sr. Technical IT Audit Manager · Neurocrine Biosciences · San Diego, CA
Where San Francisco, CA ranks
Where San Francisco, CA placed in our monthly rankings, month by month. Each month stays online at its own address.
November 2026
- #1Best cities for security jobs316 openings · of 20
- #1Best cities for technology jobs7,178 openings · of 100
- #1Best cities for financial services pay after cost of living$173k · of 33
- #1Best cities for entry-level jobs that want AI skills35% · of 100
- #1Best cities for entry-level jobs that want AI skills in the West Coast35% · of 54
- #1Cities with the most jobs that do not need a four-year degree in the West Coast902 jobs · of 47
Rankings about engineering jobs
- Best cities for software and engineering jobs #1 San Francisco (3,412 openings)
- Best cities for engineering pay after cost of living #1 San Mateo ($216k)
- Most requested AI skills in engineering jobs #1 AI tools in daily work (6.1%)
- AI tools named most often in engineering jobs #1 Claude (1.7%)
- Employers with the most engineering jobs #1 Amazon (2,992 roles)
How AI is used in this kind of work
Among computer and information systems managers, AI is already used for some of the tasks. Measured exposure for computer and information systems managers: 16% (some).
Share of this job’s tasks that AI is already used for at work, from real usage. It is not a forecast of job loss, and a low number means no use seen yet. Source: Anthropic Economic Index.
Skills this job asks for
Say which you have and which you want to build. We use it to match you to jobs like this one.
About the job
About Us
General Compute is the neocloud for alternative chips.
Inference is fragmenting: purpose-built silicon from SambaNova, Cerebras, Positron, d-Matrix, and others already beats GPUs on decode, and we productionize that hardware — we buy the racks, find the data center space, and run it for our customers. Each piece of hardware runs the workload it's actually built for: prefill stays on GPUs, decode moves to the chip built for it, and today that means generating tokens 5–7× faster than existing GPU-based competitors. Our customers are frontier labs, fast-growing AI application companies, and asset-light clouds.
We closed a $15M seed round in May 2026, and have since closed a $400M debt facility — $100M funded upfront by Upper90, with the balance available for drawdown — collateralized by our inference chips.
About the role
You'll own the infrastructure layer of our inference cloud end-to-end. Today that means the control plane, the gateway in front of our ASIC fleet, and the observability stack that tells us where every millisecond goes. Over the next 6-8 months, it will grow into a heterogeneous fleet: ASICs for decode, GPUs for pre-fill, and the physical-layer ownership that comes with it.
The first six months are hands-on: k8s manifests, dashboards, oncall, and a direct line to our ASIC partner's engineering team when production behaves strangely. The team grows under you from there.
What you'll do:
Own the inference control plane. At the moment, it's built on configuration provided by our ASIC partner; you'll be the person who understands it deeply enough to modify, extend, and eventually replace pieces of it.
Own the gateway and load balancer that fronts the fleet. Model placement, request routing, and tail-latency engineering live here, driven by live utilization and per-model SLOs.
Own observability end-to-end. Per-request tracing from OpenRouter ingress through to the accelerator, with p50/p95/p99 dashboards, SLOs, and alerting that wakes the right person.
Run capacity planning against a real, distributed traffic mix across the open-weight models we serve.
Own the operational side of the ASIC partnership. Most weird production issues route through their engineering team until we build that expertise in-house, and you'll be our technical face in those conversations.
Bring up the pre-fill side of our disaggregated architecture on a second hardware platform as it comes online. Different vendor, different fabric, different kernels.
Build the on-call and incident response practice from zero. Hire and grow the team underneath you.
What we need from you:
7+ years in infrastructure, SRE, or platform engineering, with at least some of it at a serious inference, ML, or HPC shop.
Hands-on with Kubernetes at production scale — not just deploying, but debugging the weird stuff.
Strong instincts for tail latency. You think about p99 and utilization as the same problem, not different ones.
Comfortable owning a vendor relationship where the vendor's bugs are now your production issues.
Track record of building observability practices that actually catch problems, not just generate dashboards.
Have been on-call through real incidents and can talk about what you learned.
Want to be the first infra hire at something early, not the tenth at something big.
NIce-to-Haves:
Experience operating non-NVIDIA accelerators in production — TPUs, ASICs, or alternative GPU vendors.
Background with model-serving stacks (vLLM, TGI, TensorRT-LLM, SGLang).
Network fabric experience at data-center scale (RoCE, InfiniBand).
Have hired and managed an infra team before.
Comfort at the hardware boundary — firmware, drivers, thermals — for when the roadmap takes us there.