Software Engineer

Who We Are

Cotidal is building endless compute for humanity.

We believe the current compute scarcity is a structural and enduring trend, not a passing shortage: demand for AI will outpace the world's ability to scale infrastructure for decades to come, and no single supplier or architecture will meet it. Cotidal is an AI infrastructure company that designs, builds, and operates the accelerator fleets ambitious AI teams train and serve on — expanding the supply of usable compute, and working toward a world where the cost of compute stops deciding which ideas get tried.

We believe the future of AI compute is heterogeneous, and we are building the platform for that future — designed to take on new silicon as it matures. Our first clusters are committed and come online this year, and we work directly with our initial design partners, so every layer, from the data center to the customer API, is being built by the people you will sit next to.

We’ve raised two rounds of funding in our first three months, led by top AI and semiconductor funds, with strategic financial support from partners across the chip supply chain.

The Role

We’re looking for software and systems engineers to help build Cotidal’s compute platform. Our work spans accelerator clusters, distributed infrastructure, training and inference systems, and customer products.

You’ll join a small engineering team building these systems from their earliest deployments through production scale. We welcome engineers with deep experience in one area who enjoy learning unfamiliar systems and working across boundaries. You’ll work closely with teammates and customers to understand problems, make technical decisions, and carry projects through to working software and reliable systems.

What You Will Do

You’ll help shape the projects you work on, drawing on your strengths, experience, and interests to tackle the problems ahead. The areas below offer examples of where you could contribute, with room to work across them. We don’t expect experience in all of them.

• HPC & Cluster Systems: Build and operate the accelerator clusters that power demanding AI workloads. Work across Linux, networking, storage, and hardware health to bring systems online, diagnose failures, and keep large fleets reliable and efficient.

• Software Infrastructure & Control Plane: Build the distributed systems that turn individual machines into a compute platform. Work on provisioning, scheduling, resource management, and orchestration, making complex infrastructure reliable as the fleet and its workloads grow.

• Training, Inference & Performance: Help AI teams get more from their compute. Work on training and inference frameworks, model serving, and performance across accelerators — from understanding a workload’s bottlenecks to improving how it runs in production.

• Product Engineering: Build the products through which customers use Cotidal. Work across interfaces, APIs, and backend systems, turning customer needs into useful software and owning features from the first conversation through production.

What We Are Looking For

• You’ve built things people rely on—and been there when they broke, outgrew the original design, or got used in ways you never expected.

• You follow a problem wherever it leads: dive deep into the stack, runtime, or hardware to understand a bottleneck, then zoom out to see whether fixing it solves the bigger problem.

• When the path isn’t clear, you build something to find out—a prototype, a benchmark, a small working slice. You use what you learn to decide what deserves a bigger investment.

• You have opinions about how systems should be built, can explain the tradeoffs, and have changed your mind when the evidence called for it.

Especially Valuable

Experience in one or more of the following:

• Kubernetes controllers, schedulers, or distributed systems handling resource allocation, tenant isolation, and failure recovery.

• Bare-metal provisioning and hardware bring-up; RDMA, collective communication, or distributed storage.

• Training or inference optimization with PyTorch, JAX, XLA, vLLM, or SGLang—especially batching, KV caches, quantization, and parallelism.

• Building complex, user-facing products across the full stack, with strong product judgment and attention to interaction design, performance, and reliability.

• Hands-on experience with GPU, TPUs, Trainium, Instinct, Jalapeño, WSE, or other accelerator architectures.

Who You Will Work With

Cotidal’s founding team brings together repeat founders, engineers, and operators with backgrounds at xAI, Tesla, Google, Microsoft, SSI, Figure AI, and Cursor. Your teammates have built AI infrastructure that much of the industry serves models on—and you’ll work directly alongside them.

In our first three months, we secured chip allocations, locked in our first site, and signed our first design partners. You’ll join while the architecture, engineering culture, and team are still taking shape. The systems you build, the standards you set, and the people you help recruit will shape what Cotidal becomes.

Location & What We Offer

• Location: Palo Alto, in person.

• Compensation: Competitive salary and equity.

• Visa sponsorship: We sponsor work visas and help you navigate the process.

• Benefits: Medical, dental, and vision coverage, unlimited PTO, and relocation support as needed.