---
title: 'General Counsel at The San Francisco Compute Company'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/general-counsel-the-san-francisco-compute-company-san-francisco-qq9v7whjqgmg'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-07'
---

# General Counsel at The San Francisco Compute Company

- **Company:** The San Francisco Compute Company
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $200k–$350k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-08-07
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-07
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sfcompute/71dd8480-7558-45bc-8c59-f2ee69ca04c9

## Job description

We're building the company which will de-risk the largest infrastructure build-out in history.

When people finance GPU clusters, the datacenters housing them, and the infrastructure powering them, they need "offtake" - meaning someone has signed a contract to lease the cluster for a period of time before its even built.

Financing a GPU cluster is inherently risky, since margins are thin and volumes are huge. Lenders don't want to take on the risk that cluster developers can't repay their loan, and cluster developers really don't want to risk not selling their cluster. As a result, risk is offloaded to the customer using fixed-price long-term contracts.

If you don't mitigate this customer risk, there's a bubble. This isn't SaaS anymore - application layer companies sign multi-year contracts for computer and inference, but sell to customers on monthly subscriptions. If you mess up a purchase, it's game over: a minor shift in your revenue growth rate might mean the difference between profit or bankruptcy. But what if companies could exit their contract by selling it back to the market?

Otherwise, as AI scales, compute only becomes available to folks who can effectively take on that risk. A 2-person startup in a San Francisco Victorian can't realistically sign a 5-year take or pay contract on $100m supercomputers. But they may be able to buy the month of liquidity that someone else sold back.

So that's what we make: a liquid market for GPU offtake.

## ABOUT THE ROLE

This is a role for a legal strategist–not a gatekeeper. We're building novel financial infrastructure in a market that doesn't have a rulebook yet. Our General Counsel must be a first-class business partner in the room where deals get shaped, not a checkpoint they pass through at the end.

You'll be the team’s resource for strategic advice and tactical excellence. You need commercial instinct, real strategic judgment, and the maturity to know when to protect the company and when to lean in and get a deal done. We want a thought partner who negotiates contracts that close, balancing our interests with terms our counterparties can actually live with, not just papers that are maximally favorable to SFC.

What you'll own:

- Set the legal strategy and keep it tightly aligned with where the business is going, not where it's been.
- Be a strategic thought partner to the founders and deal teams: pressure-test structures, flag the risks that actually matter, and help make the call when the path forward is genuinely ambiguous.
- Draft, negotiate, and close a wide range of contracts, including offtake agreements, partnerships, vendor deals, and licensing agreements, with a commercial, deal-making mindset that gets to "yes" without giving away the store.
- Navigate a regulatory frontier that's still being written: AI sales restrictions, AML/KYC, potential future CFTC oversight, GDPR, and financial and data-privacy laws across jurisdictions.
- Advise on corporate governance, fundraising, and investor relations, including equity and debt financing transactions.
- Partner with product to build compliance in from the start and turn legal constraints into design decisions rather than last-minute blockers.
- Own risk and crisis response, including litigation, regulatory inquiries, and disputes, with calm, decisive judgment when the stakes are highest.
- Lead our engagement with regulators and stay ahead of the emerging law shaping this space, so we're anticipating and preparing for new challenges and opportunities.
- Protect what we build: patents, trademarks, and trade secrets.
- Set the tone for legal and ethical integrity across the company through tailored policies, training, and best practices.
- Run external counsel and the legal budget with discipline and leverage.

## 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 competitive medical, dental, vision insurance for employees and dependents and cover 100% of premiums

## 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

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- [HPC/ GPU Cluster Architect](https://feeny.ai/job/hpc-gpu-cluster-architect-the-san-francisco-compute-company-san-francisco-sbe1f8983vfw) — San Francisco, CA
- [Account Executive Supply Chain](https://feeny.ai/job/account-executive-supply-chain-the-san-francisco-compute-company-san-francisco-zpz7j73v2gma) — San Francisco, CA
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