---
title: 'Member of Technical Staff, Engineering Manager at SkyPilot'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-engineering-manager-skypilot-san-mateo-zdacj7x6ywt9'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-18'
---

# Member of Technical Staff, Engineering Manager at SkyPilot

- **Company:** SkyPilot
- **Location:** San Mateo, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-09-16
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-18
- **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/skypilot/am9icG9zdDqNVewzWH3vQys-feRfIYE1

## Job description

## About SkyPilot

[SkyPilot](https://skypilot.ai/) accelerates the world's most ambitious AI teams. SkyPilot turns fragmented AI compute across clusters into one optimized, highly available and easy-to-use pool: a single AI supercomputer.

SkyPilot (10k+ GitHub stars, 18M+ downloads) manages the GPU fleets of 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. To date, SkyPilot has raised over $20M in seed funding from top investors (incl. Lux, Coatue, Amplify) and operators (incl. Ali Ghodsi, Jeff Dean, Guillermo Rauch, Amjad Masad, Clem Delangue, Aaron Levie).

## The role

We are hiring our very first Engineering Manager to grow and scale our engineering team. You will report directly to our CTO and work closely with the founders.

We are looking for someone who is hands-on, hungry for impact, and takes pride in building high-performing teams. The ideal candidate understands the output of a manager is the sum of the outputs of all of their reports.

You'll lead the engineering team, stay involved in technical work, and shape product directions alongside the founders: reviewing customer call recordings and notes, aggregating requests across accounts, and deciding what the team builds next. You'll have direct exposure to our largest customers.

## What you'll do

Build and lead a high-performance engineering team

- Recruit, coach, and grow a team of distributed systems and AI infrastructure engineers.
- Set the engineering culture and practices needed as the team scales, driving high performance and ownership.
- Give fast, direct feedback.

Drive technical directions

- Participate in design reviews, code reviews, and architecture decisions.
- Own reliability, security, and operational standards for a control plane that frontier AI teams depend on
- Guide the team as the platform expands into more use cases.

Shape product directions for the platform

- Work with the CTO and the founders to set priorities.
- Review customer call recordings and notes, aggregate feature requests and bugs across customers, and turn them into a prioritized roadmap, weighing retention of existing customers and growth of new accounts.

Deliver

- Translate the roadmap into milestones, sequence work across parallel projects, track execution, and serve as the escalation point for major incidents.

## What we're looking for

- 8+ years of software engineering experience with 3+ years managing engineers (teams of 10+), ideally at a fast-growing infrastructure or developer-tools company.
- Experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems or cloud platforms in production, and still able to contribute technically.
- Hands-on with Kubernetes or Slurm, and familiar with GPU workloads. Experience with schedulers, orchestration, or AI infrastructure is a plus.
- Comfortable acting as the product manager for your area: synthesizing customer input, running an intake and triage process, and making prioritization calls with incomplete information.
- Strong product intuition and care for both developer experience and enterprise needs, and able to make and communicate hard tradeoffs.
- Experience as an early engineering leader at a startup, prior PM experience, or building enterprise platforms (multi-tenancy, RBAC, HA control planes) is a strong plus.

## What we offer

- Competitive compensation and equity.
- Comprehensive medical, dental, vision coverage for you and your dependents.
- The chance to work with some of the best minds in AI infrastructure and distributed systems, with significant autonomy and ownership.
- A front-row seat at the latest open-source infra startup from Berkeley.
- Gourmet lunch & dinner for the team to do their best work.

Location: San Mateo, CA.

## 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)](https://skypilot.ai)**: 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](https://skypilot.ai)**: 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.

## Why Work Here
- **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](https://jobs.gem.com/skypilot)).

## Sources
1. [skypilot.ai (homepage)](https://skypilot.ai)
2. [skypilot.ai (about)](https://skypilot.ai/about)
3. [skypilot.ai (funding announcement blog)](https://skypilot.ai/blog/skypilot-the-company)
4. [fortune.com](https://fortune.com/2026/07/21/skypilot-from-databricks-cofounder-raises-20m-to-be-the-switzerland-of-ai-compute/)
5. [prnewswire.com](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/skypilot-launches-with-20m-to-accelerate-custom-intelligence-for-frontier-ai-teams-302830808.html)

## Other roles at SkyPilot

- [GTM Specialist](https://feeny.ai/job/gtm-specialist-skypilot-san-mateo-c1js372pj0j0) — San Mateo, CA
- [Product Marketing Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/product-marketing-manager-skypilot-san-mateo-ac5fset49yp9) — San Mateo, CA
- [Member of Technical Staff, Product](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-product-skypilot-san-mateo-3fvgs8gy6hqw) — San Mateo, CA
- [Member of Technical Staff, Platform](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-platform-skypilot-san-mateo-4efm1nkm0rsp) — San Mateo, CA
- [Member of Technical Staff, GPU / ML Systems](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-gpu-ml-systems-skypilot-san-mateo-cjcq4ysp96ka) — San Mateo, CA
- [General Application](https://feeny.ai/job/general-application-skypilot-san-mateo-jht04k9gw4xr) — San Mateo, CA
- [Founding Account Executive](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-account-executive-skypilot-san-mateo-jxym4wpcxwb5) — San Mateo, CA
- [Forward Deployed Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-skypilot-san-mateo-eyv68cyw4ghc) — San Mateo, CA
- [Developer Relations Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/developer-relations-engineer-skypilot-san-mateo-sw1asm63sxv5) — San Mateo, CA
- [Member of Technical Staff, Distributed Systems](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-distributed-systems-skypilot-san-mateo-g32j2zaakscz) — San Mateo, CA