Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure

About Liquid Compute

Liquid Compute is building the financial layer for AI compute. GPU capacity is still bought and sold through fragmented, bespoke agreements: prices are hard to compare, supply is difficult to finance, and buyers and operators have few ways to manage volatility.

We are building one market across transparent reference indices, a derivatives exchange pending CFTC designation as a Designated Contract Market and registration as a Derivatives Clearing Organization, physical delivery, and credit. Our goal is to let market participants price, trade, settle, and finance GPU compute with the clarity expected of a mature asset class.

We are an early team backed by Y Combinator, working with AI companies, data centers, neoclouds, trading firms, and financial institutions. Joining now means helping define both the product and the market around one of AI’s most important inputs.

The role

Liquid Compute’s software sits at the intersection of market data, commercial contracts, infrastructure providers, and physical delivery. You will design and operate the core services that represent capacity and price, move transactions through reliable workflows, and connect a financial contract to usable compute.

This is broad infrastructure engineering on an early team, not a narrow operations role. You will work across architecture, backend services, data, reliability, and production operations, and you will help define the technical standards the platform grows around.

What you will own

• Contract-to-compute workflows. Design APIs, services, and stateful workflows that move from quote or transaction through reservation, provider handoff, delivery, usage, settlement, and reconciliation.
• Reliable data and audit trails. Build ingestion and reconciliation pipelines for price, availability, contract, and usage data with the lineage and controls expected of financial infrastructure.
• Production ownership. Write tests, instrument services, improve deployment safety, participate in incident response and on-call as the platform matures, and fix recurring failure modes at their source.
• Technical foundations for a growing team. Make pragmatic architecture decisions, review code and designs, document operational context, and create tools that help other engineers move faster without weakening reliability.

What success looks like

• Core workflows are dependable. New product and commercial requirements can be implemented without fragile one-off paths or manual reconciliation becoming the default.
• Data is trusted. Capacity, pricing, contract, and delivery records reconcile across systems and support auditable decisions.
• The team compounds. Your designs, documentation, tooling, and engineering judgment raise the speed and quality of everyone building on the platform.

What you bring

• You have roughly 3–6 years of relevant software engineering experience in backend, platform, infrastructure, distributed systems, or another production systems domain. Scope and evidence of ownership matter more than an exact year count.
• You reason clearly about state and failure. You understand data modeling, consistency, idempotency, retries, queues, concurrency, partial failure, and the tradeoffs in distributed workflows.
• You have owned production services. You have shipped, monitored, debugged, and improved systems after seeing how they behave under real load and real incidents.
• You are strong in at least one general-purpose programming language and comfortable working with relational databases, APIs, background jobs, tests, and modern observability tooling.
• You can work across boundaries. You communicate clearly with engineers and with commercial, operations, legal, or product partners whose requirements do not arrive as perfect specifications.
• You like first-principles building. You can choose a simple design, ship it, learn from reality, and strengthen the system without overengineering the first version.

Helpful, not required

• Cloud, neocloud, GPU, or HPC infrastructure including capacity, provisioning, orchestration, scheduling, networking, storage, or multi-provider operations.
• Market or financial infrastructure such as exchanges, trading systems, clearing, market data, payments, ledgers, reconciliation, or regulated workflows.
• Workflow orchestration or control-plane systems that coordinate long-running work across unreliable external dependencies.
• Security, compliance, or auditability work where correctness, permissions, change control, and evidence matter.

How we work

We operate with a high level of ownership and an unusually fast pace. We want to be transparent about the current cadence: the team generally works about 60 hours across six days, with some week-to-week and role-specific flexibility. Candidates should evaluate that expectation honestly; this is not a conventional 9-to-5 environment.

Because the team is small, you will work directly with the founders and make decisions that affect company direction. We value sound judgment, clear communication, and people who move from ambiguity to action without creating needless process.

Compensation and benefits

• Base salary: $250,000–$300,000, based on experience and role scope.
• Equity: 0.10%–0.30%.
• Benefits: Medical, dental, and vision coverage, plus a 401(k).

How to apply

Email careers@liquidcompute.com with “Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure” in the subject. A CV or a profile, and a few lines on the closest thing you have built to this, is plenty. We read every one.