Head of Compute

The role

At Applied Compute, securing the right compute on the right terms is what makes our post-training and agent infrastructure possible. As Head of Compute Partnerships, you'll own the sourcing, economics, and strategic positioning of the GPU capacity that powers everything we train, serve, and deploy for enterprise customers.

This is one of the highest-leverage roles at the company. Compute is both our core input and our binding constrain. Your job is to make sure Applied Compute has a leading seat at the table structuring the commercial relationships that define our cost structure for years, getting early access to new hardware generations as they come online, and turning a fragmented global supply market into a durable advantage. You'll work directly with our founders, our GTM function, and the leadership teams at providers reshaping global compute, and you'll partner closely with our research and engineering teams to decide what we train, on what hardware, where, and at what cost.

What you'll do

Own the unit economics of compute end-to-end, from the structure of individual contracts to the margin architecture across training and inference products to the long-term P&L consequences of today's supply commitments

Run global procurement of GPU capacity across hyperscalers, tier-one neoclouds, regional operators, and emerging providers

Negotiate and close reserved capacity agreements, spot and burst arrangements, MSAs, DPAs, and order forms

Secure early access to the latest accelerator generations in the quantities we need

Partner with finance and leadership on capital strategy: how much to commit, to whom, over what term, on which hardware, and with what balance sheet exposure

Build the frameworks that translate supply decisions into clear financial outcomes and let the company make large bets with conviction under uncertainty

Work with research to translate training roadmaps and RL workloads into concrete compute requirements, and feed back what's achievable

Partner with engineering on acceptance testing, goodput validation, and technical qualification of new providers and hardware

What we're looking for

Strong business and financial instincts, with native fluency in unit economics, margin structure, and capital allocation, and the ability to model the long-term P&L consequences of complex supply decisions

Deep knowledge of the global AI compute market, including the providers, the hardware generations and their real tradeoffs, pricing dynamics, and where the market is heading over the next 12 to 24 months

A track record of negotiating and closing contracts at meaningful scale, finding and using leverage, and structuring deals that drive downstream economics

Comfort operating across finance, commercial, product, and engineering, and translating fluently between all of them

High ownership, with a habit of seeing gaps and building the fix before anyone asks

Strong candidates also have

Experience structuring large infrastructure or capacity agreements

Existing senior relationships across hyperscalers, neoclouds, or regional compute providers

Background spanning both finance or capital allocation and hands-on commercial negotiation

Experience sourcing compute or hardware in a high-growth environment where supply was the primary constraint

An AI-native way of working, using LLMs, automation, and programmatic tools to move faster

The U.S. base salary range for this full-time position is $226,000–$325,000 . Total compensation for this role also includes meaningful equity in a fast-growing startup, along with a comprehensive benefits package designed to support you both personally and professionally. Base salary is determined by a range of factors including individual qualifications, experience, skills, interview performance, market data, and work location. The listed salary range is intended as a guideline and may be adjusted.

About us

Applied Compute builds Specific Intelligence for the enterprise. We provide the continual learning infrastructure for companies to build agent workforces trained on proprietary data and institutional expertise. Our researchers and platform embed directly within customer environments to build custom evals, train models, and deploy agents that get better with use.

Why we’re excited: We get to work at a rare intersection. Our product team builds the platform powering a new generation of digital coworkers. Our research team pushes the frontier of post-training and reinforcement learning. Our applied AI team sits side-by-side with customers as they ship agents into production. This combination of strong product, deep research, and boots on the ground is what we believe it takes to bring AI to the enterprise. We are product-led, research-enabled, and forward-deployed.

Who we are : We’re a team of engineers, researchers, and operators. Many of us are former founders. We've built RL infrastructure at OpenAI, data foundations at Scale AI, and systems at Together, Two Sigma, Watershed, and others. We work with F50 customers and are fortunate to be backed by partners like Kleiner Perkins, Benchmark, Sequoia, Lux, and Greenoaks.

Who Thrives Here : We're looking for people who are excited about applying novel research and complex systems to real-world problems. Our team genuinely enjoys working with customers: listening, empathizing, and understanding how work actually gets done in their organizations. Former founders, people who've built a lot of side projects, or anyone who's shown they can own something end-to-end, tend to do well here.

Benefits & Logistics

This role is based in San Francisco. We work from our office in the Mission. We offer:

Competitive compensation and equity

100% employer-paid health insurance coverage for you and your family

Unlimited PTO

Paid parental leave

Daily lunches and dinners

Transportation and relocation support

5% 401k match

We sponsor visas. While we can't guarantee success for every candidate or role, if you're the right fit, we're committed to working through the process with you. We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. As set forth in Applied Compute’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.