---
title: 'Developer Relations Engineer at Vast.ai'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/developer-relations-engineer-vast-ai-san-francisco-19dx882ce5x1'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# Developer Relations Engineer at Vast.ai

- **Company:** Vast.ai
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $160k–$200k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-08-17
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/vastai/4da10bf3-498e-4951-bedf-82b979bb1901

## Job description

## About Vast.ai

Vast.ai runs one of the largest GPU marketplaces in the world. Over 20,000 GPUs, from RTX 4090s up to B300s, rented by more than 25,000 customers a month who train, fine-tune, and serve AI models on them. We are profitable, the team is flat, and we ship quickly. Your application goes straight to the hiring team.

## The role

This is an engineering job that happens in public. You will be our heaviest user. Most of your week goes to renting GPUs on Vast and building things on them. Serving open source models with vLLM and SGLang. Fine-tuning. Running ComfyUI pipelines. Keeping live inference endpoints up, including token endpoints on markets like OpenRouter. Writing the example repos, Docker templates, and benchmarks that other developers copy. The rest of your week is spent showing your work. Short videos, technical write-ups, answers in Discord and on Reddit, hackathons. You are not building the Vast product. You are using it harder than any of our customers, in the open, and reporting back everything that breaks. If you want a content calendar and a campaign plan, this is the wrong job. If you already spin up GPUs on weekends because you want to see whether the new model actually runs, keep reading.

## What you'll do

- Run real workloads on Vast every week. Deploy, fine-tune, and serve open source models, and keep live endpoints running.
- Build public example repos, Docker templates, and benchmarks that developers can clone and use.
- Turn what you build into teaching: guides, short videos, talks, livestreams.
- Be the most technically credible voice in our Discord, on Reddit, and on X.
- Represent Vast at hackathons and conferences, roughly one trip a month.
- Report the friction, the breakage, and the missing docs straight to engineering and product.

## What we need to see

- You can take an open source model from Hugging Face to a running endpoint on rented GPUs with nobody helping you. Linux, Docker, Python, SSH.
- You can debug the GPU stack. Driver and CUDA mismatches, out of memory errors, and multi-GPU configuration including NCCL and topology issues do not scare you.
- Public proof of work you have shipped. A GitHub profile, technical writing, or live projects. We will ask you to walk us through code you wrote and explain the parts that went wrong.
- You work without a roadmap and prefer it that way. Nobody here will hand you a task list.
- You can explain a hard thing clearly, in writing and out loud.

## Nice to have

- Content or side projects that found a real audience.
- Previous developer relations, community, or customer-facing work. Useful here, but it is a bonus and not the job.
- vLLM or SGLang internals, distributed training with FSDP or DeepSpeed, CUDA.
- Time at a cloud, GPU, AI infrastructure, or developer tools company.

First 90 days

- Ship several public example projects on Vast, including at least one live serving endpoint.
- Publish benchmarks or guides that developers actually use and pass around.
- Become the recognizable technical voice in our community channels.
- Represent Vast at a sponsored hackathon.

## Compensation & benefits

$160,000 to $200,000 base, plus equity and bonus. Health, dental, vision, and life insurance. 401(k) with company match. Meals on site. Travel and conference budget. This role is on site in San Francisco or Los Angeles.

## About Vast.ai

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Vast.ai operates a decentralized GPU marketplace that enables developers and AI agents to provision and manage compute power across a global network of hardware, offering a cost-effective alternative to hyperscaler clouds.
- **Entity Type**: Private (raised $30M in funding)
- **Headquarters**: Los Angeles, CA (1100 Glendon Ave, STE 1840) and San Francisco, CA (100 1st Street, STE 2250)
- **Founded**: 2016 (incorporated June 28, 2016)
- **Founders**: Jake Cannell (CEO) and Christian Horne

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Cloud infrastructure / GPU compute / AI infrastructure
- **Target customers**: AI researchers, ML engineers, AI agent developers, enterprises needing GPU compute for training and inference
- **Mission**: "To organize, optimize, and orient the world's computation."
- **Vision**: "To make life substrate-independent through Vast Artificial Intelligence."

## Products & Services
- **GPU Cloud**: On-demand instances across 20,000+ GPUs in 40+ data centers. Deploy via CLI, SDK, Python API. Per-second billing. Real-time pricing set by supply and demand. [vast.ai](https://vast.ai/)
- **Serverless Inference**: Deploy models as endpoints with automatic GPU optimization, auto-scaling to zero, pay-per-compute-time. [vast.ai](https://vast.ai/)
- **GPU Clusters**: Dedicated multi-node clusters with InfiniBand networking for large-scale training. [vast.ai](https://vast.ai/)
- **API & SDK**: REST API, Python SDK, CLI for programmatic compute provisioning. Agent-native interface for autonomous compute procurement. [vast.ai](https://vast.ai/)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly available
- **Key Metric**: Total funding $30M (as of 2026, per jobsbyculture.com) [jobsbyculture.com](https://jobsbyculture.com/blog/working-at-vast-2026)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not disclosed in available sources
- **Growth Signals**:
  - 310% year-over-year growth (2024–2025)
  - 20,000+ GPUs, 350+ hosts, 700K+ transactions/month
  - SOC 2 Type I certification achieved in 2024
  - Enterprise and Secure Cloud offerings launched; customers include professional data center partners
  - Headcount grew from fully distributed team to 40+ employees across two offices (LA & SF) [vast.ai/about](https://vast.ai/about)
  - Conflicting reports: jobsbyculture.com cites ~30 employees, while vast.ai/about states "40+ employees"

## Competitive Advantages
- **Decentralized marketplace model**: Taps into underutilized GPU hardware (gaming rigs, mining farms, research labs, small data centers) to offer compute at 3–5x cheaper than AWS, no contracts required.
- **Agent-ready infrastructure**: The same API used by developers is designed for AI agents to autonomously procure and optimize compute – a moat for the upcoming agentic economy.
- **Real-time, transparent pricing**: Prices set by supply and demand, programmatically queryable via API. No hidden costs or enterprise sales friction.
- **Heterogeneous hardware support**: 68+ GPU types across 40+ data centers, enabling users to compare and switch between hardware types easily.
- **SOC 2 certified**: Security and compliance for enterprise workloads.

## Strategic Focus
- **Agentic compute**: Building an "infrastructure layer where AI agents design, procure, and optimize their own compute" [vast.ai](https://vast.ai/)
- **Enterprise expansion**: Growing Secure Cloud (certified data centers) and dedicated cluster products for professional customers.
- **Scaling the network**: Increasing GPU count, host partnerships, and geographic diversity while maintaining real-time pricing and low latency.
- **Open infrastructure**: Keeping compute distributed and independent, countering hyperscaler concentration.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: "High level of rigor, precision, and professionalism" – employees are stakeholders who own the impact of their work. Fast-paced startup environment where initiative is rewarded. [vast.ai/about](https://vast.ai/about)
- **Work location**: On-site in Los Angeles (Westwood) or San Francisco (SOMA). Not remote – all current openings require on-site presence.
- **Perks**: Comprehensive health/dental/vision insurance, 401(k) with company match, meaningful early-stage equity, onsite meals and snacks, close collaboration with founders and tech leaders. [vast.ai/jobs](https://vast.ai/jobs)
- **Interview process**: Screened by technical team; stages include a 15-min screening, 45-min deep dive, 1-hour LLM-assisted coding assessment, and 2-hour on-site meet-and-greet. Aim to complete in about one week. [vast.ai/jobs](https://vast.ai/jobs)
- **Salary ranges**: For roles like Senior Infrastructure Engineer and GPU Systems Engineer, posted salary $120K–$180K (may vary by role). [vast.ai/jobs](https://vast.ai/jobs)
- **Engineering culture**: Reports directly to CEO/founder Jake Cannell, a prolific writer on AI and compute scaling theory. Emphasis on systems engineering, GPU optimization, and cutting-edge research.

## Sources
1. [vast.ai/about](https://vast.ai/about)
2. [vast.ai](https://vast.ai/)
3. [vast.ai/jobs](https://vast.ai/jobs)
4. [jobsbyculture.com](https://jobsbyculture.com/blog/working-at-vast-2026)
5. [vast.ai/jobs/apply/systems-gpu-research-engineer](https://vast.ai/jobs/apply/systems-gpu-research-engineer)

## Other roles at Vast.ai

- [Head of Sales](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-sales-vast-ai-los-angeles-yrkth8v89kkh) — Los Angeles, CA
- [Controller](https://feeny.ai/job/controller-vast-ai-los-angeles-0d4jvgnj6v48) — Los Angeles, CA
- [AI, HPC & GPU Infrastructure Support Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-hpc-gpu-infrastructure-support-engineer-vast-ai-los-angeles-40e39w8ek9p1) — Los Angeles, CA
- [Systems Operations Support Engineer — Linux](https://feeny.ai/job/systems-operations-support-engineer-linux-vast-ai-los-angeles-v3hjj8k7jj4v) — Los Angeles, CA
- [Technical Product Manager, Infrastructure](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-product-manager-infrastructure-vast-ai-los-angeles-b0h8y0t8d4fy) — Los Angeles, CA
- [Technical Support Engineer II (Linux)](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-support-engineer-ii-linux-vast-ai-los-angeles-0h1q79ajj6kc) — Los Angeles, CA
- [Director of Engineering](https://feeny.ai/job/director-of-engineering-vast-ai-san-francisco-q3avgemppyhv) — San Francisco, CA
- [Senior Infrastructure Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-infrastructure-engineer-vast-ai-los-angeles-ejanf64s8d34) — Los Angeles, CA
- [Security Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/security-engineer-vast-ai-los-angeles-5p7ef9m994ce) — Los Angeles, CA
- [GPU Systems Engineer – HPC / Parallel Computing](https://feeny.ai/job/gpu-systems-engineer-hpc-parallel-computing-vast-ai-san-francisco-e7dn3x08y2sq) — San Francisco, CA