Compute Lead

Goodfire•San Francisco, CA

7d•Onsite

About The Position

Goodfire is an AI interpretability research lab focused on building interpretability agents and infrastructure to understand, monitor, and align AI models. The Compute Lead will be responsible for managing one of the company's most critical resources: compute for model training, research, and customers. This role involves overseeing compute allocation, sourcing and securing capacity, managing cluster acceptance testing, monitoring cluster health, tracking utilization, and partnering with research and product teams to translate roadmaps into compute requirements. The ideal candidate will have strong judgment, the ability to make tough decisions, and a passion for infrastructure, operations, and high-stakes resource allocation.

Requirements

Ability to navigate GPU scarcity and partner negotiations with rigor
Exceptional urgency in execution
Strong judgment to balance competing demands across teams
Conviction to make hard trade-offs rather than split the difference
Experience in infrastructure, operations, and high-stakes resource allocation

Responsibilities

Manage Goodfire’s compute allocations across training, research, and customer workloads
Source and secure capacity: gather availability and pricing across providers, move quickly on the best options, and take deals from first call through contract and delivery
Own cluster acceptance testing: define acceptance criteria with our infrastructure team and run burn-in and performance testing before we sign off
Monitor cluster health once live: track node failures and downtime, and drive fixes with providers
Track utilization and quota usage by project, flag idle or underused capacity, and reallocate quickly so GPUs are going to our highest-priority work
Partner closely with research and product teams to translate roadmaps into concrete compute requirements and ensure infrastructure never becomes a bottleneck
Build forecasting models that anticipate compute demand and enable confident long-term planning and budgeting