VP of Engineering

Location: North America Remote / San Francisco, CA · Full-Time

About Andromeda

Andromeda Cluster was founded by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross to give early-stage startups access to the kind of scaled AI infrastructure once reserved only for hyperscalers.

We began with a single managed cluster — but it filled almost instantly. Since then, we’ve been quietly building the systems, network, and orchestration layer that makes the world’s AI infrastructure more accessible.

Today, Andromeda works with leading AI labs, data centers, and cloud providers to deliver compute when and where it’s needed most. Our platform routes training and inference jobs across global supply, unlocking flexibility and efficiency in one of the fastest-growing markets on earth.

Our long-term vision is to build the liquidity layer for global AI compute. We are expanding to new frontiers to find the brightest that work in AI infrastructure, research and engineering.

The Role

We’re hiring a VP of Engineering to lead the technical organization behind Andromeda’s platform and operations.

This is a builder–operator role, not a pure people-management role.

This is a change leadership role, not a “scale what already works” role. Our platform works, but it’s held together with speed and hustle, not systems and automation. Your job is to introduce the structure we need to scale, and do so without alienating a high-performing team or grinding the business to a halt. That’s a hard balance. It requires technical depth and organizational patience. If you succeed here, you will help define how AI compute is bought, sold, and operated at scale.

You sit at the intersection of:

• Product and platform development

• Customer solutions and support

• Provider onboarding and lifecycle management

• Enterprise security and compliance

• Technical credibility with customers, partners, and OEMs

Where We Are Today

We’re a fast-moving team that has shipped a working platform in a compressed timeline and achieved hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. We’ve prioritized speed and iteration over process and documentation, and that’s been the right tradeoff to get here. But we’re approaching an inflection point. We have real technical debt, operational gaps, and scaling constraints that need to be addressed. The challenge is doing this without grinding the business to a halt or alienating a high-performing team that’s built something real and valuable.

You’ll inherit a team that operates with high trust, informal communication, and a bias toward building. They’re skeptical of heavy process, because they’ve seen it slow things down elsewhere. Your job is to earn their trust, then introduce the systems and structure we need to scale, at a pace the organization can metabolize.

What You’ll Own

1. Build the Platform (Hands-On Where It Matters)

You own the architecture, development, and operation of:

• Andromeda Cloud – Customer-facing experience for provisioning and managing workloads

• Andromeda Rails – Intelligence layer for workload matching, monitoring, utilization, and SLA enforcement

• Andromeda OS – Supply-side system for onboarding, benchmarking, monitoring, and monetizing GPU infrastructure

Success looks like a world-class developer experience, frictionless supply onboarding, and automated matching between the two.

2. Own Customer Solutions and Support

Engineering is customer-facing at Andromeda. You are accountable for:

• Platform stability, performance, and uptime

• Incident response, observability, and post-mortems

• DevOps and SRE excellence

• Turning customer pain into fast product improvements

This is about clear ownership and fast response—not heavy process.

3. Be a Technical Partner to Revenue

Engineering is a core revenue enabler.

You will:

• Support large, complex, high-stakes deals with deep technical credibility

• Translate customer needs into concrete architectures

• Build tools, benchmarks, demos, and POCs that accelerate sales

• Equip GTM teams with accurate technical materials and guardrails

• Close the loop between the field and the roadmap

You’ll regularly engage with senior technical leaders at AI labs, enterprises, OEMs, and cloud providers—and you must hold your own.

4. Build the Engineering Organization (Without Bureaucracy)

You will build a small, elite, high-trust engineering team.

That means:

• Hiring exceptional engineers with strong judgment and ownership

• Putting the right people in the right seats

• Setting clear priorities and technical direction

• Avoiding premature process while enforcing accountability

This is not a place for bureaucracy, politics, or ego.

5. Own Security and Compliance

You are the executive owner of platform trust.

You will:

• Lead SOC 2 Type II and ISO readiness and certification

• Define security architecture across platform, infrastructure, and data

• Manage third-party risk and vendor security

• Support enterprise and government procurement

• Build a compliance roadmap that scales without slowing innovation

How You’ll Approach Change

• You will not walk in and propose pausing product development. You will not propose hiring 15 people in month one. You will not present a 90-day transformation plan in your first week.

• Instead, you will:

  • Focus on adding value and earning trust/ credibility quickly within the first few weeks of joining.

  • Spend a large block of your time in the first 30 days learning the business, team, and building relationships.

  • Introduce process/ structure/ hiring plans incrementally, with clear rationale and team input

What Success Looks Like in Year One

• You are deeply trusted by the engineering team

• You have a strong grasp of the product, market, and system

• The platform is stable, performant, and scaling with demand

• Customer experience is reliable and responsive

• Supply onboarding is increasingly automated

• Sales closes larger, more complex deals faster with strong technical backing

• The engineering org is aligned, energized, and executing

• SOC 2 Type II and ISO are complete or well underway

What We’re Looking For

You may be a fit if you:

• Are extremely interested in, excited about, and familiar with modern AI infrastructure

• Are a senior engineering leader who still goes hands-on when needed

• Have architected, built, and operated infrastructure or developer platforms

• Are a strong systems thinker with sound judgment under ambiguity

• Are comfortable in zero-to-one and one-to-scale environments

• Are credible with customers, partners, and senior technical stakeholders

• Have experience with reliability-critical systems (infra, SRE, networking)

• Have exposure to enterprise security and compliance

Not a fit if you:

• Lead with authority before earning trust

• Move faster on org change than relationship building

• Need large teams, lots of meetings, and heavy process to feel effective

• Delegate design / architecture instead of owning it

• Avoid customer-facing responsibility

• Prefer planning over shipping

What’s Hard About This Role

• The team has shipped a lot with informal processes. They’re proud of it, and they should be. But they’re also skeptical of “process people.” You’ll need to earn the right to introduce structure for us to move beyond 0 – 1, so we can move to 1 - 10.

• Some of the changes we need require cultural shifts, not just technical ones. You’ll need to be a change agent, not just an architect.

• Leadership is deeply involved in the business and has strong opinions. You’ll need to influence through alignment, not unilateral authority. Major decisions–hiring plans, process changes, team structure–require buy-in before execution.

Andromeda Cluster is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.