Director of Engineering
About The Position
Vast.ai's cloud powers AI projects and businesses globally, aiming to democratize and decentralize AI computing. We are a growing, motivated team with an ambitious technical plan, characterized by a flat structure, outsized ambitions, and leadership earned through shipping excellence. We seek engineers with strong intrinsic drive, a passion for advancing the state of the art, and a blend of architecture, coding, and communication skills. This role is based on-site at our offices in San Francisco or Westwood, Los Angeles. The Director of Engineering will report directly to the founder and CEO, Jake Cannell, who is deeply involved in technical architecture. The role involves partnering with the CEO to translate technical direction and product priorities into a high-functioning engineering organization focused on clear ownership, fast delivery, strong code quality, sustainable reliability, and continuous team improvement. This is not a purely managerial position; the candidate should be comfortable working in the codebase and earning technical trust through judgment, reviews, and occasional critical-path shipping. Initially, the role will lead a group of approximately 8 engineers across two product/infrastructure teams, with a broad technical surface area including distributed infrastructure, GPU scheduling and availability, marketplace dynamics, developer experience, payments and billing, reliability, security, and high-throughput backend systems. The position is ideal for someone who enjoys building both the product and the engineering organization that supports it.
Requirements
- 10+ years building software, with real depth in at least one of distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, GPU/ML systems, or high-throughput backend platforms
- 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 Haves
- Marketplace or infrastructure company experience
- CUDA/GPU stack familiarity
- An open-source track record
Responsibilities
- 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
- 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
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
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Director
Education Level
No Education Listed
