--- title: 'Strategic Finance Senior Associate - Compute at Together AI' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-finance-senior-associate-compute-together-ai-san-francisco-wj1kj7w3vds8' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-11' --- # Strategic Finance Senior Associate - Compute at Together AI - **Company:** Together AI - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Posted:** 2026-08-17 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-11 - **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/togetherai/jobs/5212018007 ## Job description ## About the Role As a Strategic Finance Senior Associate at Together, you will own the cost side of our data center build-outs. Reporting to the Director of Strategic Finance, Infrastructure, you will be the financial counterpart to our Infrastructure Strategy team: building and maintaining the cost base for every deployment, validating that build-outs are tracking to plan, and helping evaluate the economics of the sites we take on next. This is a hands-on, high-ownership role at the center of the largest capital decisions the company makes. The ideal candidate has done this before: inside a hyperscaler, neocloud, colocation provider, or data center developer, or covering data centers from the investing side, and pairs real infrastructure fluency with exceptional financial rigor. ## Responsibilities - Own the cost base and cost forecast for Together's data center build-outs, spanning data center non-recurring costs, hardware capex across GPUs, networking, and storage, and ongoing operating costs - Validate that build-outs are tracking to plan: maintain budget-versus-actual against approved estimates, flag variances early with a clear read on the driver, and work with Infrastructure Strategy and Infrastructure Engineering to close them out - Maintain the all-in unit cost of owned capacity, on a dollars-per-GPU-hour basis by GPU type, as the source of truth used for pricing, margin, and capital allocation decisions - Partner with Infrastructure Strategy to evaluate new data center opportunities, building the economics for candidate sites including prepays, financing requirements, tax treatment and incentives, and total cost of ownership over the life of the site - Pressure-test hardware cost assumptions and surface savings opportunities with Infrastructure Engineering and Infrastructure Strategy, from equipment choices to storage sizing and cluster configuration trade-offs at different scales - Translate hardware delivery timelines and payment milestones maintained by Infrastructure Strategy into the cash forecast, and own tracking of prepays to hardware and data center suppliers, so that cash forecasting reflects real commitments - Build the reporting layer: dashboards and recurring processes that give leadership a current view of committed capital, spend to date, and forecast to complete, by site ## Requirements - 4+ years of experience with substantive exposure to data center or large-scale infrastructure capex, via one of two paths: - Operating side: finance, capex planning, or infrastructure strategy/FP&A at a hyperscaler, neocloud, colocation provider, data center developer, or another operator running large build-out programs - Investing side: investment banking, infrastructure investing, or project finance with a data center / digital infrastructure focus, ideally paired with time in-house at an operator - Working knowledge of the cost stack of a data center build: non-recurring costs, hardware capex (GPUs, networking, storage), power and cooling, and ongoing operating costs, and how each flows through COGS, depreciation, and cash - Exceptional financial modeling skills, including site-level TCO and scenario analysis, with the ability to distill a complex build into the handful of drivers that actually move the outcome - Demonstrated ownership of budget-versus-actual for large capital projects, with the discipline to catch variances early and the credibility to drive them to resolution - Comfort working directly with technical partners: able to hold a substantive conversation with infrastructure engineers, translate it into a cost number, and communicate the result clearly to non-technical and non-financial audiences - Exceptional business judgment and intuition, with the creativity and problem-solving instincts to tackle novel questions where there is no established playbook - Strong work ethic and self-directed, with the ability to manage multiple workstreams under tight timelines and close attention to detail ## About Together AI Together AI, the AI Native Cloud, is purpose-built for AI engineers. AI application developers get high-performance inference that scales reliably, fine-tuning and reinforcement learning for creating frontier-level specialized models, and pre-training at massive scale for fully custom intelligence, all around a marketplace of leading open models that teams can run, adapt, and own. Trusted by Cursor, Decagon, ElevenLabs, Salesforce, and Zoom, Together serves 400+ trillion tokens a month. ## Compensation We offer competitive compensation, startup equity, health insurance and other competitive benefits. The US base salary range for this full-time position is: $138k - $175k + equity + benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by location, level and role. Individual compensation will be determined by experience, skills, and job-related knowledge. ## Equal Opportunity Together AI is an Equal Opportunity Employer and is proud to offer equal employment opportunity to everyone regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, veteran status, and more. Please see our privacy policy athttps://www.together.ai/privacy ## About Together AI ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Together AI is the AI Native Cloud, a full-stack platform for production AI that provides inference, fine-tuning, and GPU compute powered by cutting-edge systems research. - **Entity Type**: Private (Series C) - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States - **Founded**: 2022 - **Founders**: Vipul Ved Prakash (CEO), Ce Zhang (CTO), Tri Dao (Chief Scientist), Chris Ré, Percy Liang ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: AI Infrastructure / Cloud Computing - **Target customers**: B2B – AI-native startups (e.g., Cursor, Decagon, Eleven Labs), enterprise SaaS (Salesforce, Zoom, Zomato), and AI researchers. - **Mission**: “Significantly lower the cost of modern AI systems by co-designing software, hardware, algorithms, and models” — with a commitment to open and transparent AI development. ## Products & Services - **Serverless Inference**: Fast on-demand inference for open-source models with no infrastructure management. - **Batch Inference**: Asynchronous processing of massive workloads (up to 30B tokens per model) at reduced cost. - **Dedicated Model Inference**: Deploy models on dedicated GPU infrastructure for speed and control. - **Dedicated Container Inference**: GPU infrastructure optimized for generative media (video, audio, image). - **Fine-Tuning**: Fine-tune open-source models using latest research techniques (improves accuracy, reduces hallucinations). - **Accelerated Compute**: Self-serve instant clusters to thousands of GPUs, optimized with Together Kernel Collection. - **Model Shaping**: Tools to accelerate inference, model shaping, and pre-training. - **Managed Storage**: High-performance object storage and parallel filesystems with zero egress fees. - **Sandbox**: Fast, secure code sandboxes for AI app/agent development environments. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed; recent Series C reportedly doubled valuation (amount undisclosed) [cbinsights.com](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/together-4) - **Key Metric**: **Total Funding** – $1.334B (including $800M Series C announced in mid-2026) [cbinsights.com](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/together-4) - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Kleiner Perkins, NVIDIA, Salesforce Ventures, Prosperity7 Ventures (Aramco), and 29+ others across rounds. - **Growth Signals**: - Headcount grew 91% YoY to ~280 employees [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/togethercomputer) - Acquired CodeSandbox (Dec 2024) and Refuel.AI (May 2025) - Customers include Cursor, Decagon, Eleven Labs, AI21, Hedra, Cartesia, Salesforce, Zoom, Zomato - Published nine papers at ICML 2026; open-sourced ParallelKernelBench ## Competitive Advantages - **Full-stack AI platform** covering inference, fine-tuning, compute, storage, and sandboxes — all integrated. - **World-class research team** co-designing algorithms, kernels, and hardware (e.g., Tri Dao, co-inventor of FlashAttention). - **Open-source commitment** and contributions (models, datasets, research) build developer trust and ecosystem lock-in. - **Cost performance**: Claims 2x faster inference and 60% lower cost vs. alternatives through research-driven optimizations. ## Strategic Focus - Accelerate the shift to open-source AI by making it economically viable at scale. - Continue investing in systems research (GPU programming, kernel optimization, model shaping) to improve performance and cost. - Expand enterprise adoption through dedicated deployments and partnerships. - Grow the platform’s capabilities (e.g., managed storage, sandboxes) to reduce friction for AI-native builders. ## Why Work Here - **Culture**: Values include “Do more with less,” “Open and responsible development,” “Empower innovation,” and “Optimizers” — a research-driven, mission-oriented environment. - **Remote/Hybrid/Office**: Primarily office-based in San Francisco (251 Rhode Island Street) with employees across 16 countries. Office perks include lunch, dinner, snacks, parking/transit stipends, and relocation support. - **Benefits**: Competitive salary and equity, 401K matching, health/dental/vision insurance, flexible PTO, generous parental leave, life and disability protection. - **Engineering Culture**: Deep focus on systems research and open-source; engineers work alongside leading AI researchers (e.g., Tri Dao, Ce Zhang). Talent sourced from Apple, Google, Amazon, NVIDIA, Stanford AI Lab. - **Career Growth**: 53 active job postings (as of mid-2026); roles span ML engineering, platform engineering, research, and go-to-market. High growth trajectory offers rapid advancement. ## Sources 1. [together.ai/about-us](https://www.together.ai/about-us) 2. [together.ai/](https://www.together.ai/) 3. [together.ai/careers](https://www.together.ai/careers) 4. [linkedin.com/company/togethercomputer](https://www.linkedin.com/company/togethercomputer) 5. [cbinsights.com/company/together-4](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/together-4) ## Other roles at Together AI - [Staff Engineer, Distributed Storage and HPC & AI Infrastructure](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-engineer-distributed-storage-and-hpc-ai-infrastructure-together-ai-qmwmf2cw8b8j) — Bengaluru, India - [Senior ABM & Campaign Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-abm-campaign-manager-together-ai-san-francisco-b4m47ckm79bn) — San Francisco, CA - [Technical Support Engineer - India](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-support-engineer-india-together-ai-pune-or-bangalore-mwn804cwswws) — Pune OR Bangalore, India - [Senior Software Engineer — Infra Agent Systems](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-infra-agent-systems-together-ai-san-francisco-xc82f200r1ws) — San Francisco, CA - [Senior ABM & Campaign Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-abm-campaign-manager-together-ai-san-francisco-zc1zxaar2h1f) — San Francisco, CA - [Senior Software Engineer — Infra Agent Systems](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-infra-agent-systems-together-ai-amsterdam-0kn67tn8tkvp) — Amsterdam, Netherlands - [Senior Software Engineer — Infra Agent Systems UK](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-infra-agent-systems-uk-together-ai-london-bxf797ge7pxk) — London, United Kingdom - [Senior Software Engineer — Infra Agent Systems Remote India](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-infra-agent-systems-remote-india-together-ai-india-4y1jwwt42nqs) — India - [HR Coordinator- Amsterdam](https://feeny.ai/job/hr-coordinator-amsterdam-together-ai-amsterdam-e41wg9k2gakq) — Amsterdam, Netherlands - [Staff Software Engineer, Inference / Compute Infrastructure Engineering](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-software-engineer-inference-compute-infrastructure-engineering-together-5j8djmf3gdbk) — London, United Kingdom