VP of Systems
$335,000–$400,000 year
On-siteAustin, Texas, United States or San Mateo, California, United States
Job Summary
Own the development of inference servers and racks, managing electrical, mechanical, and systems engineering from board design through full system bring-up. Lead the Systems team to execute end-to-end power architecture, high-speed channel budgets, and integration of optical processing units into scalable rack topologies. Drive hardware/firmware/software validation, system reliability, and phase gates for EVT/DVT/PVT sign-offs while owning schedule and budget for the organization. Report to the SVP of Engineering in a startup redefining AI compute with silicon photonics.
Required Qualifications
- Shipped server/rack products at volume through an ODM/OEM/CM or a hyperscaler/DGX-class program, with design ownership.
- Fluent from L1–L10. From component/PCB through full server-node assembly and validation.
- Extensive direct line management experience and have run a hardware engineering organization from near-scratch to scale.
- Real NPI scars — owned EVT/DVT/PVT gates, spin decisions, and qualification.
- Board & system-electrical depth — layout direction, on-board power, SI/PI, high-speed interfaces (PCIe Gen6/7, Ethernet/OSFP), and validation.
- End-to-end channel & power closure — with owned link budgets for high-speed interfaces (PCIe Gen6/7, 800G+ Ethernet) and an end-to-end power architecture, not just board-level SI/PI.
- Operates well in a defined-interface organization — comfortable owning deep electrical authority while designing to interface definitions and product envelopes set by other teams.
- System-architecture ownership — has owned or led rack/tray/board architecture.
- 15+ years hardware development — BS/MS in EE/ME or equivalent track record.
- Austin, TX or Sunnyvale, CA
- Full-time onsite position
Desired Qualifications
- Rack/cluster integration (L11/L12) for AI training/inference deployments.
- Scale-out fabric/networking depth: Ethernet leaf-spine, OSFP, RDMA/RoCE.
- OCP experience: OAM/UBB and ORv3 rack power; contributor a plus.
- 0→1 startup experience or adjacency to optical/photonic/analog-heavy systems.
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