Talent Acquisition Manager

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 function needs an owner who can step in, steady what's in flight, and then build it properly. This is a build-and-run role, with strategy coming later. You'll carry a live req load yourself from week one, writing the outreach, running the screens, and closing the offers, while designing the hiring engine that makes the next fifty hires repeatable. You'll start solo, with agencies and sourcing partners for extra capacity, and build a team underneath you as volume justifies it. You decide when that is and make the case for it. You'll report to our People Leader and partner closely with our People Operations Manager and Office Manager. This role suits someone who's genuinely energized by ambiguity, who'd rather diagnose a messy pipeline and rebuild it than inherit a polished process and maintain it. We're a lean team in a fast-evolving company, so the scope of this role will keep expanding alongside it; this description is a starting point, not a ceiling. This role is located in our SF office and has the opportunity for hybrid work from home with a minimum of three days a week in the office.

Responsibilities

• Own full-cycle recruiting for technical and strategic non-technical roles, sourcing through close, carrying a meaningful req load personally rather than delegating it outward.

• Partner with hiring managers to define role requirements, success criteria, and ideal candidate profiles, and hold the line on the bar when a search gets painful.

• Build the hiring engine: repeatable sourcing motions, structured interview loops, scorecards, debrief norms, and closing strategies that survive your absence.

• Own and evolve the recruiting stack (currently Ashby), including data integrity, reporting, and periodically assessing whether the tooling still fits.

• Manage agency and sourcing partner relationships and the budget behind them, including deciding when we don't need them.

• Own the candidate experience from first outreach through offer acceptance, ensuring timely communication and a process that reflects well on us whether or not someone gets hired.

• Develop our talent brand through content, events, communities, and candidate touchpoints, measured by pipeline rather than impressions.

• Use data to run the function: pipeline health, conversion by stage, time-to-fill, and source effectiveness. Build just enough reporting to operate proactively rather than reactively.

• Scope and build the talent team as hiring volume demands it, making the case for headcount, hiring sourcers or coordinators, and managing them well.

• 8+ years of full-cycle recruiting experience, including time at a high-growth startup, a talent-dense engineering organization, or a top-tier search firm

• A proven track record closing hard-to-fill technical roles. You can hold your own in a conversation with an infrastructure or systems engineer, and you know when a candidate is bluffing

• Experience owning a recruiting function, not just a req list: ATS ownership, process design, reporting, and agency management

  • Have built and managed a small talent team: sourcers, coordinators, or recruiters

• Comfort operating at both altitudes, advising a hiring manager on comp strategy one hour and writing sourcing outreach the next. No part of the work is beneath you

• The ability to sell the vision: you can distill a complex technical problem into a pitch that a great candidate wants to hear

• Real conviction about talent quality and culture add rather than hitting a number, and the judgment to know when a "no" is worth the delay

• Fluency with modern recruiting tooling (Ashby, LinkedIn Recruiter, Gem/Juicebox, Slack, Notion) and comfort using data to spot problems before they become misses

• Have been the founding or first recruiter at a Series A to C AI, deep tech, or infrastructure company

• Have run employer brand work that measurably moved inbound pipeline, not just visibility

• Have hired across both technical and non-technical functions (engineering, GTM, ops, G&A)

• Have hands-on experience with Ashby specifically

The person who thrives here won't have done this exact job before, because at this stage this exact job doesn't really exist yet anywhere else. It's a founding recruiter's workload with a functional leader's scope, in a company whose hiring bar is the thing everything else depends on. What matters more than a perfect resume match is whether you're the kind of person who gets energy from an undefined problem, builds the plane while flying it responsibly, and treats "I don't know yet, but here's how I'll find out" as a completely acceptable answer in week one. If you read this and thought "I can figure that out" rather than "I'd need a playbook first," that's the signal we're looking for.

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.