General Application at SkyPilot (San Mateo, CA)

SkyPilot· San Mateo, CA·17h ago

Role details

Work type

Onsite

Employment

Full-Time

Job description

Don't see the right fit? If you love hard problems at the intersection of AI and Systems, let's build.

If you're excited about what we're building at SkyPilot but don't fit neatly into one of our open roles, this is for you. We care most about working with exceptional people who love hard problems — so tell us who you are, what you'd want to work on, and why SkyPilot. We read every one.

About SkyPilot

SkyPilot accelerates the world's most ambitious AI teams. Every hour they spend fighting infrastructure is an hour the frontier doesn't move — so SkyPilot turns fragmented compute across clusters into one optimized, highly available and easy-to-use pool: a single "AI supercomputer."

SkyPilot (10k+ GitHub stars, 14M+ downloads) is deployed at 100s of companies — from Fortune 500s to top AI-natives like Abridge, Applied Compute, Mistral, Unconventional AI, H Company, and Nubank — with usage growing exponentially. Born in the UC Berkeley lab behind Spark and Databricks, our growing team includes top-tier talent from Databricks, Google, Berkeley, MIT, CMU, and Cornell.

Why work at SkyPilot

Cutting‑edge mission: Building the foundational infrastructure for the AI industry alongside top hyperscalers and neoclouds.
Strong team: Founded by renowned systems researchers and backed by elite investors and AI leaders.
Traction & growth: Explosive adoption (6x growth in GPU hours) and a clear product‑market fit with frontier AI teams.
Autonomy & impact: Small, fast‑moving startup where engineers can directly shape a control plane used by thousands of GPUs.
Work policy – not publicly specified, but typical for a stealth‑stage startup; likely offers flexibility. The team is headquartered in San Francisco.
Careers: Open roles in Engineering and GTM (see SkyPilot on Gem).

About SkyPilot

Company Overview

One-liner: SkyPilot provides a unified AI compute platform that turns fragmented GPU clusters across hyperscalers, neoclouds, and on-premises resources into a single, manageable “AI supercomputer.”
Entity Type: Private (Seed stage – raised $20M)
Headquarters: San Francisco, California, USA
Founded: Not publicly available (company launched from stealth in July 2026; technology originated from UC Berkeley’s Sky Computing Lab)
Founders: Zongheng Yang (CEO), Zhanghao Wu, Romil Bhardwaj, alongside Databricks co-founder Ion Stoica and networking pioneer Scott Shenker (both Berkeley professors)

Core Business

Primary industry: AI infrastructure / cloud computing orchestration
Target customers: Frontier AI teams – including research labs, foundation model builders, healthcare, financial services, and large enterprises – that need to manage large-scale GPU fleets across multiple providers.
Mission / Purpose: “Turn fragmented compute into one AI supercomputer” so that AI teams can spend less time managing infrastructure and more time building intelligence.

Products & Services

SkyPilot Platform (Managed): A managed control plane that abstracts heterogeneous compute (Kubernetes, Slurm, VMs, hyperscalers, neoclouds) into a single pool. Supports interactive development, pre‑training at scale, sandboxes for RL/agents, multi‑cluster serving, and production workloads. Includes GPU health monitoring, auto‑remediation, HA, quota management, SSO, RBAC, and SOC 2 compliance. Customers have seen up to 20x performance improvements over the open‑source version.
SkyPilot Open Source: Free, community‑driven project with 14M+ downloads and 280+ contributors. Used by hundreds of organizations to unify compute across 20+ clouds. Provides CLI, intelligent scheduler, GPU monitoring, and multi‑cluster support.

Market Standing

Valuation / Market Cap: Not disclosed (seed round)
Key Metric (Private): Total Funding – $20M seed (July 2026)
Notable Investors & Partners:
- Lead: Lux Capital
- Participants: Amplify Partners, Coatue Management, Foundation Capital, Race Capital, The House Fund
- Angel operators: Ali Ghodsi (Databricks), Jeff Dean (Google), Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), Amjad Masad (Replit), Clem Delangue (Hugging Face), Tristan Handy (dbt Labs)
- Cloud partners: Nebius, CoreWeave, Lambda, AWS (EKS, EC2, S3, SageMaker Hyperpod)
Growth Signals:
- 14M+ open‑source downloads (6M in last 3 months)
- GPU hours consumed grew 35% MoM (6x in last 6 months)
- Top deployments: 1,000+ nodes and 10,000+ GPUs
- 280+ open‑source contributors
- Adopted by Nubank, Abridge, Applied Compute, H Company, Archer, Hippocratic AI

Competitive Advantages

Unified abstraction across 20+ clouds and any accelerator – customers are not locked into a single provider.
AI‑native scheduling (topology‑aware, priority queueing, GPU sharing, preemption) that maximizes fleet utilization.
Proactive GPU health checks with auto‑remediation – reduces downtime in large training runs.
Enterprise‑grade security (BYOC, BYOK, private VPCs, air‑gapped, SOC 2) combined with the agility of an open‑source ecosystem.
World‑class founding team – includes a Databricks co‑founder and UC Berkeley systems researchers.

Strategic Focus

Product development – continue building out the managed platform (already 20x faster than OSS).
Engineering expansion – actively hiring in engineering and go‑to‑market roles.
Go‑to‑market growth – opening platform access to select new customers; scaling sales.
Open‑source ecosystem – deepen contributions and community engagement.

Sources

Job description

About SkyPilot

Why work at SkyPilot

Application questions