---
title: 'Commercial Counsel at The San Francisco Compute Company'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/commercial-counsel-the-san-francisco-compute-company-san-francisco-hwm8yv3a9k28'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-09'
---

# Commercial Counsel at The San Francisco Compute Company

- **Company:** The San Francisco Compute Company
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-11-05
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-09
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sfcompute/d428c15d-970e-41ec-86ac-82142ab33162

## Job description

## About San Francisco Compute

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 and supercomputers, 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 enable subleasing, we invented the first compute market and became the first 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 lets us retain the technical control needed to run a cloud while scaling fast like a market. SFC’s ability to offer subleasing can significantly increase the levered returns for cluster owners.

Our hybrid model outperforms brokered contracts or other “compute markets,” which 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.

## About the Role

SF Compute is looking for a Commercial Counsel to help build and scale our commercial legal function as we grow our AI infrastructure business. This role will partner closely with Sales, Business Development, Finance, Operations, Engineering, and leadership teams to structure, negotiate, and execute high-impact commercial agreements that enable the business to move quickly while managing risk. You will own a broad range of commercial transactions, including enterprise customer agreements, strategic partnerships, technology agreements, vendor contracts, and infrastructure-related deals. This is a highly collaborative role for a practical, business-oriented attorney who enjoys operating in ambiguity, solving complex problems, and building scalable processes in a fast-moving technology environment. The ideal candidate combines strong commercial judgment with a genuine interest in AI, compute infrastructure, and emerging technologies. You will help create the legal foundation that allows SF Compute to scale responsibly and efficiently. This role is based in our San Francisco office and requires working onsite five days per week. We believe close collaboration and in-person partnership are critical as we build the legal foundation for a rapidly scaling AI infrastructure company.

## What You Will Do

- Draft, review, negotiate, and manage commercial agreements, including enterprise customer agreements, master services agreements, vendor agreements, technology agreements, strategic partnerships, NDAs, and other similar contracts.
- Partner with Sales, Business Development, Finance, Operations, and Engineering teams to structure deals that align with business objectives while appropriately managing legal and commercial risk.
- Serve as a trusted legal advisor to business teams, providing practical guidance on contract strategy, negotiation approaches, and business tradeoffs.
- Support commercial transactions involving AI infrastructure, compute services, data center operations, technology partnerships, and other strategic initiatives.
- Develop and improve contract processes, playbooks, and frameworks that enable teams to move faster while maintaining appropriate controls.
- Identify and proactively address legal, regulatory, privacy, intellectual property, and operational considerations impacting commercial activities.
- Work cross-functionally with internal stakeholders and external partners to drive deals from initial discussions through execution.
- Bring strong ownership and judgment to new and evolving legal challenges as the company scales.

## Who You Are

- JD from an accredited law school and active membership in at least one U.S. state bar (California preferred)
- 3-5+ years of legal experience, including experience at a leading law firm and/or in-house legal team.
- Strong experience drafting and negotiating a broad range of complex commercial technology agreements.
- Experience supporting technology companies, cloud infrastructure, AI, data centers, SaaS, hardware, or other technical businesses strongly preferred.
- Ability to understand complex technical products and translate business objectives into practical legal solutions.
- Comfortable operating independently in a fast-paced, high-growth environment with evolving priorities.
- Excellent communication skills and the ability to build trusted relationships across technical and non-technical teams.

## 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 highly competitive medical, dental, vision insurance for employees and dependents.

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.

## About The San Francisco Compute Company

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: San Francisco Compute provides large-scale, vetted GPU clusters with flexible, short-term contracts and a liquid market that lets customers sublease unused capacity.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A; $52M total funding)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Evan Conrad (Co-Founder)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: AI infrastructure / GPU cloud computing
- **Target customers**: AI startups, enterprises, and research labs needing large-scale GPU clusters for pre-training, inference, and high-performance computing
- **Mission or purpose**: “De-risk the largest infrastructure build‑out in history” by creating a liquid market for GPU offtake, allowing companies to exit long-term contracts by selling capacity back to the market.

## Products & Services
- **GPU Cluster Rentals (H100 / H200)**: Virtual machines (VMs) and bare-metal clusters with 3.2 Tb/s InfiniBand fabric, parallel storage, and fast networking. Pricing starts at $2.04/hr per H100 node and fluctuates with market conditions. [sfcompute.com](https://sfcompute.com/)
- **Managed Slurm Clusters**: For customers who need a fully managed HPC scheduler environment. [sfcompute.com](https://sfcompute.com/)
- **Liquid Market for Offtake**: Customers can sign long-term contracts but then “sell back” unused capacity on a central limit order book, reducing the risk of being locked into fixed commitments. [sfcompute.com](https://sfcompute.com/about)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding – $52M (Series A: $40M led by Wing Venture Capital and DCVC in November 2025; earlier venture round: $12M led by Altman Capital in July 2024) [cbinsights.com](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/san-francisco-compute-company)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Wing Venture Capital, DCVC, Altman Capital
- **Growth Signals**: 112% YoY headcount growth (35 employees); featured in The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and The New York Times; operates thousands of GPUs with ~1hr average lead time for scaling; active job postings for engineering roles. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/sfcompute)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Flexible contracts**: No forced long-term commitments; customers can exit by selling capacity on the liquid market.
- **Own infrastructure stack**: Runs its own virtualization and bare-metal software, unlike a pure reseller.
- **Fast provisioning**: VMs spin up in about 5 minutes; large clusters in ~1 hour.
- **Failure-tolerant design**: Refunds for failed nodes and can repack healthy hardware.
- **Dedicated support**: Large clusters get a dedicated Slack channel with the engineering team and emergency phone escalation.

## Strategic Focus
- **Building the GPU offtake marketplace**: Enabling lenders and cluster developers to de-risk financing by offering customers an exit mechanism.
- **Expanding InfiniBand support**: Planning to offer InfiniBand on VMs in Q3 2026 (currently available on bare metal and managed Slurm).
- **Scaling operations**: Growing the team (currently 35) and continuing to expand cluster capacity in multiple regions (US, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Australia).

## Why Work Here
- **Engineering-led culture**: 32% of employees are in technical roles; the team builds and operates the full stack from UEFI up.
- **Small, fast-moving team**: 35 employees with 112% YoY growth, offering ownership and impact.
- **Location**: In-person culture in San Francisco (“the great city of progress”).
- **Notable perks**: Direct access to engineering, hands-on experience with cutting-edge GPU infrastructure, and the chance to solve novel problems in AI infrastructure financing.
- **Open roles** (6 active postings): Software Engineer (Systems, Cloud, Product), HPC/GPU Cluster Architect, Technical Program Manager, People & Talent Acquisition Leader. [jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sfcompute)

## Sources
1. [sfcompute.com](https://sfcompute.com/) – Official website, pricing, FAQ
2. [sfcompute.com/about](https://sfcompute.com/about) – Mission, business model, market concept
3. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/sfcompute](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sfcompute) – Careers page, open roles
4. [linkedin.com/company/sfcompute](https://www.linkedin.com/company/sfcompute) – Company details, headcount, funding, employee breakdown
5. [cbinsights.com](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/san-francisco-compute-company) – Funding rounds, investors, headquarters

## Other roles at The San Francisco Compute Company

- [Principal/Staff HPC Network Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/principal-staff-hpc-network-engineer-the-san-francisco-compute-company-san-br0cy03c1e6y) — San Francisco, CA
- [Customer Support Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/customer-support-engineer-the-san-francisco-compute-company-san-francisco-zje500wa86pa) — San Francisco, CA
- [HPC/ GPU Cluster Architect](https://feeny.ai/job/hpc-gpu-cluster-architect-the-san-francisco-compute-company-remote-sbe1f8983vfw)
- [Compute Partnerships Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/compute-partnerships-manager-the-san-francisco-compute-company-san-francisco-zpz7j73v2gma) — San Francisco, CA
- [Staff Design Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-design-engineer-the-san-francisco-compute-company-san-francisco-ysj84b7g1kte) — San Francisco, CA
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