---
title: 'Director of Engineering at Vast.ai'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/director-of-engineering-vast-ai-san-francisco-q3avgemppyhv'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# Director of Engineering at Vast.ai

- **Company:** Vast.ai
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-07-07
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/vastai/19a6c1dc-d915-43c0-9c42-b8305cfd3089

## Job description

## About Us

[Vast.ai](https://vast.ai)’s cloud powers AI projects and businesses all over the world. We are democratizing and decentralizing AI computing—reshaping our future for the benefit of humanity. We are a growing and highly motivated team dedicated to an ambitious technical plan. Our structure is flat, our ambitions are out‑sized, and leadership is earned by shipping excellence. We seek engineers with strong intrinsic drive, a true passion for advancing the state of the art, and a mix of architecture, coding, and communication skills. LOCATION: On-site at our office in San Francisco or Westwood, Los Angeles.

## The Role

You will report directly to Jake Cannell, our founder and CEO, who built the platform and remains deeply involved in technical architecture. You will partner with him to turn technical direction and product priorities into a high-functioning engineering organization: clear ownership, fast delivery, strong code quality, sustainable reliability, and a team that gets better every quarter. This is not a purely managerial role. The right candidate still enjoys working in the codebase and earns technical trust through judgment, reviews, and occasional critical-path shipping. You will initially lead a group of approximately 8 engineers across two product/infrastructure teams. The technical surface area is broad: distributed infrastructure, GPU scheduling and availability, marketplace dynamics, developer experience, payments and billing, reliability, security, and high-throughput backend systems. The role is ideal for someone who likes building both the product and the engineering organization behind it.

## What You Will Own

- Delivery across the customer-facing platform: console, APIs, CLI/SDK, serverless, clusters, billing, and the marketplace engine
- Hiring and team design: partner with recruiting to source, assess, close, and onboard senior engineers; maintain a high talent bar; and build the team structure needed to support the roadmap. You will own hiring outcomes for your group.
- Engineering quality: review standards, CI, test coverage, incident response, and an on-call rotation that does not burn people out
- Team growth: developing engineers into senior engineers and seniors into leads
- Execution cadence: turning Jake's technical direction and product priorities into shipped software on predictable timelines, with the minimum process that makes us faster

First Six Months, Concretely

- Ship code in week one
- Own delivery for a group of engineers across two to three teams by day 90
- Build and execute a hiring plan that results in four or more high-quality senior engineering hires, while preserving the technical bar
- Stand up incident review and release processes that engineers actually like
- Earn the org's trust the only way that works here: technical judgment demonstrated in the codebase

You Are

- A strong engineer first: 10+ years building software, with real depth in at least one of distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, GPU/ML systems, or high-throughput backend platforms
- An experienced leader: 5+ years managing engineers, including hiring, performance management, and team building at a fast-moving company
- Hands-on by choice: you review code daily and still ship
- Direct: you give sharp, kind feedback and expect the same
- Pragmatic about process: you add structure only where it increases shipping speed, and you cut everything else

Nice to have: marketplace or infrastructure company experience, CUDA/GPU stack familiarity, an open-source track record.

## Benefits

- Comprehensive health, dental, vision, and life insurance
- 401(k) with company match
- Meaningful early-stage equity
- Onsite meals, snacks, and close collaboration with founders/tech leaders
- Ambitious, fast-paced startup culture where initiative is rewarded

## 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
- [Developer Relations Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/developer-relations-engineer-vast-ai-san-francisco-19dx882ce5x1) — San Francisco, 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
- [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