Head of Compute and Capacity - Lithos Ai

Unusual Ventures • San Francisco Bay Area, CA

5d

About The Position

Lithos builds high-speed agentic inference products using frontier open models on standard GPUs. The company serves startups and large enterprises through a public API and customer hardware. Founded by Carnegie Mellon computer science professors, Lithos is a small team making one of its first ten hires.

The Head of Compute and Capacity owns the compute capacity strategy, a critical commercial function reporting directly to the founders. The role ensures Lithos has the right compute in the right locations and at the right price to meet demand while maintaining speed, cost, and uptime commitments. The position takes over active vendor deals and initially operates as a team of one, building the processes, analytical tools, and vendor relationships needed to scale.

Requirements

• At least 7 years of experience in compute capacity, infrastructure procurement, or data-center commercial roles at a neocloud, colocation provider, OEM or channel partner, or hyperscaler capacity team.
• Personal experience negotiating and closing infrastructure contracts worth seven figures or more, including commit structures, drawdowns, and SLA remedies, with the ability to discuss a deal in detail.
• Strong numerical and commercial understanding of GPU-hour costs, utilization, power density, delivery lead times, and effective cost per unit of performance.
• Working knowledge of current GPU generations and high-speed networking technologies, including InfiniBand and RoCE, and the factors distinguishing an effective cluster from an expensive one.
• Ability to initially work as a team of one, building spreadsheets, processes, and vendor relationships independently.

Nice To Haves

• Experience managing capacity for AI inference or training workloads.
• Vendor-side experience selling GPU capacity to AI labs.

Responsibilities

• Own the multi-year capacity plan, translating demand forecasts and the model roadmap into GPU, network, and data-center requirements.
• Lead procurement and negotiation of GPU capacity, networking, and colocation across neoclouds, colocation providers, OEMs, and hyperscalers.
• Develop a broad vendor bench to reduce reliance on any single supplier.
• Lead infrastructure contracts end to end, including commit profiles, drawdown schedules, pricing, acceptance testing, uptime definitions, service credits, network fabric performance guarantees, and SLA remedies.
• Take over live, in-flight vendor deals.
• Build and maintain a rolling price book and vendor scorecard covering market pricing, delivery reliability, and real-world performance by vendor, region, and GPU generation.
• Model total cost of ownership per unit of performance and measure cost per token and cost per GPU-hour against actual hardware performance.
• Use cost and performance analysis to guide capacity decisions.
• Partner with systems and inference engineering teams to ensure purchased hardware suits the software and that acceptance tests verify its performance.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed