Director of Engineering

About this role

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