The AI developer cloud that bootstrapped from basement GPUs to a $1B valuation.
The company was founded in 2022 and bootstrapped to over $24M in revenue with no venture money and no debt before taking a $20M seed co-led by Intel Capital and Dell Technologies Capital in May 2024. Annualized revenue passed $120M in January 2026 and, per The Next Web, roughly doubled to about $240M by June 2026, when Runpod closed a $100M Series A led by Summit Partners at a $1B valuation, having turned down buyout offers above $500M. Total funding is $122M. The team is around 120 people, and the company says it is building toward several hundred.
Runpod is an AI developer cloud: on-demand GPU Pods for development and training, Serverless endpoints for production inference and agents, and multi-node Clusters, all in one account with per-second billing and no minimum commitment. It runs NVIDIA and AMD hardware across 31 regions, and the founders' stated goal is that people building on Runpod think about their models and products, not infrastructure. More than a million developers use it, the platform has served over 20 billion inference requests, and named customers include Replit, Cursor, OpenAI, Perplexity, Wix and Zillow; Deep Cogito trained its Cogito v1 model family entirely on Runpod in 75 days.
Zhen Lu, CEO and co-founder. Holds a PhD in computational chemistry from Temple University, where he studied the electronic structure of DNA base pairs, and was an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh before switching to software. Then a software engineer and later software engineering manager at Comcast, where he and Pardeep Singh spent six years helping grow a software team from eight to nearly 100 people.
Pardeep Singh, CTO and co-founder. Senior software engineer at Comcast for eight years (2014 to 2022) before Runpod. Has coded since before college and paid for it with a free app that built YouTube music playlists; wrote Runpod's first MVP in Go in about three months and says he was never fond of "the bureaucracy and the politics of being a CEO," which is why Lu took that seat.
Runpod is a remote-first company that hires in the United States, Canada, Europe, India, Singapore and Malaysia. It was started in New Jersey and keeps hubs in San Francisco, an office in Charlotte, North Carolina, opened in late 2024 for revenue, marketing and account management, and sponsored coworking in Seattle; most current openings are remote within the US, with a few in EMEA.
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Own test automation and reliability for AI cloud infrastructure and distributed systems; US work authorization required, no visa sponsorship, background check, on-call; 10+ years, Python/Go/TypeScript, CI/CD, Kubernetes, load testing, observability, chaos engineering; early QA team, equity, Series A scale.
Remote US only; must be eligible to work in the United States, no visa sponsorship.
Own L1 ticket queue for AI cloud platform users, resolving and escalating customer issues; US work eligibility required, no visa sponsorship, weekend/allocated shift, background check; 2+ years shell scripting, Python, SQL, REST APIs, GraphQL; bonus: Docker, observability, CRM/ticketing, Linux/SSH, AI inference/fine-tuning; Series A, equity
Remote US only; must be eligible to work in the United States, no visa sponsorship
Own and grow fewer than 20 strategic AI infrastructure accounts with FDE partners; ideal location UK or Ireland; periodic travel; 6+ years account management, 2+ years complex accounts, multi-year 7–8 figure renewals, HubSpot, AI infra/cloud/developer tooling; Series A, equity.
Remote EMEA; ideal candidate in UK or Ireland
Own accounting strategy, close, reporting, controls, audits, tax and technical accounting for an AI cloud company; remote US, must be eligible to work in the US, no visa sponsorship, background check; 8+ years accounting, 5+ leading teams, CPA, US GAAP, SOX/audit leadership; reports to CFO, $100M Series A, equity
Remote US only; must be eligible to work in the United States, no visa sponsorship
Own cross-team delivery for GPU cloud platform systems that schedule, scale, and run AI workloads; US work authorization required, no visa sponsorship; 3+ years TPM or software/infrastructure engineering, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, observability, SDLC; bonus: AI/ML platforms, startup; Series A, equity
Remote US only; must be eligible to work in the United States, no visa sponsorship
Own pipeline analytics, revenue forecasting, deal pricing, commissions, and marketing ROI for AI infrastructure GTM; must be eligible to work in the US, no visa sponsorship; 4+ years, financial modeling/forecasting, Excel/Sheets, CRM, BI; bonus: startup, commissions, US GAAP; Series A, equity.
Remote US only; must be eligible to work in the United States, no visa sponsorship.
Own financial analytics for GPU capacity and infrastructure in AI cloud; US work authorization required, no visa sponsorship, background check; 4+ years in finance/FP&A/corp dev, Excel/Sheets modeling, BI/operational datasets; bonus: SQL, US GAAP, lease accounting; Series A, reports to Director of Finance
Remote US only; must be eligible to work in the United States, no visa sponsorship
Lead security for an AI cloud platform across cloud, app sec, SecOps, and GRC; must be eligible to work in the US, no visa sponsorship; 7+ years leading security teams, 8+ years securing SaaS/IaaS, Kubernetes, Linux, networking, virtualization; bonus: SOC2, ISO27001, AI/ML security; Series A, equity
Remote US only; must be eligible to work in the United States, no visa sponsorship
Own Runpod’s first in-house video function for AI developer cloud marketing; US work authorization required, no visa sponsorship; technical/developer audience video, Remotion or code-based video generation, After Effects/motion design, end-to-end program ownership; first video hire, player-coach, equity, Series A
Remote US only; must be eligible to work in the United States, no visa sponsorship
Own end-to-end LLM serving performance for an AI cloud; must be eligible to work in the United States, no visa sponsorship; 5+ years, vLLM/SGLang, Python, inference optimization, GPU profiling; bonus: CUDA/Triton; Series A, equity.
Remote US only; must be eligible to work in the United States; no visa sponsorship.
Own customer-facing technical onboarding, architecture advice, troubleshooting, and POCs for an AI cloud platform; APAC-based, ideally Malaysia/Singapore/South Korea; 3+ years software development, applied AI/LLM use cases; bonus: Python, JavaScript, Go, Docker, Linux, databases, networking; Series A, equity.
Remote APAC; must be located in APAC, ideally Malaysia, Singapore, or South Korea. Posting also mentions eligibility to work in the United States and no visa sponsorship.
Own new enterprise AI infrastructure deals in APAC; periodic travel; 8+ years sales incl. 4+ years enterprise technical sales, 6–7 figure deal history, cloud/infrastructure/AI/ML/GPU acumen, Japanese and English; bonus: AI/ML/cloud network; Series A, equity
Remote APAC; ideal candidate in Singapore, Malaysia, or Japan.
Lead and scale analytics/BI for an AI infrastructure platform, owning company metrics, self-serve analytics, and executive/board insights; US work eligibility required, no visa sponsorship; 8+ years analytics/BI/data science, 3+ years team management, SQL, dbt, warehouse modeling, consumption/marketplace metrics; bonus: advanced degree; Series A, equity
Remote US only; candidates must be eligible to work in the United States, and visa sponsorship is unavailable.
Requires 7+ years of product management experience with at least 3 years in a leadership role within a hyper-growth environment. Candidates must possess deep expertise in cloud infrastructure, AI/ML workflows, and modern backend architectures.
Remote US only; candidates must be eligible to work in the United States, no visa sponsorship.
Candidates must have a bachelor's degree in a relevant field and at least 3 years of professional software development experience. Strong problem-solving skills and familiarity with applied AI use cases such as inference, fine-tuning, or LLM-based applications are required.
Remote EMEA (must be located there). Visa sponsorship not available; must be eligible to work.
Candidates must have experience as a software engineer with proficiency in Python, JavaScript, or Go and a track record of creating technical content. You should be comfortable working with high autonomy and possess familiarity with GPU compute, ML infrastructure, or AI workflows.
Remote in the United States; based in US (listed SF, CA). No visa sponsorship.
This is one of the rare AI infrastructure companies that made money before it raised any. Zhen Lu and Pardeep Singh spent about $50,000 on Ethereum mining rigs in their New Jersey basements, converted them into GPU servers when the software for using GPUs turned out to be, in Lu's words, "hot garbage", and found their first users with a Reddit post offering free access in exchange for honest feedback. They hit $1M in revenue within nine months, never offered a free tier, and ran for nearly two years on customer revenue alone. The seed round came because a Dell Technologies Capital partner noticed those Reddit posts. Forbes put the company on its Next Billion-Dollar Startups list in 2024, two years before the $1B round.
The growth numbers are still steep: signups grew 155% year over year, net dollar retention is 120%, the platform pushes over 8 exabytes of network traffic a year at above 99.9% uptime, and the median new developer runs a first workload within an hour of signing up. Runpod says it hires people who want "ownership, useful work, and a front-row seat" to how AI infrastructure gets built, and it expects people to wear multiple hats: engineers talk to customers, the sales team is technical, and operators shape the roadmap.
Runpod names three guiding virtues on its About page: "Give a sh*t" (work with people who care about customers and each other), "Look in the mirror" (reflect on your own actions first), and "Choose courage over comfort" (tackle hard truths directly). The careers page adds: "We are building a serious company, but not a sterile one. There are mixtapes. There is lore. There are strong opinions about infrastructure."
Transparency is the operating habit. Jean-Michael Desrosiers, Head of Enterprise and the company's second hire, describes a weekly meeting where the entire company reviews a scorecard of what is working and what needs fixing, and a norm that when someone hits a problem "they don't hide it; they broadcast it." He also says decisions get made quickly, sometimes before every data point is perfectly squared away. Lu's framing of the customer relationship is blunt: "When someone builds their company on your infrastructure, there's only one acceptable answer: be there."
Employees describe a caring version of startup intensity. Jamie Ilario, Business Operations Associate, on Built In: "Runpod balances startup energy with a caring culture. While everyone is busy building something amazing, they always take the time to guide and support each other." A Glassdoor engineer review from 2026 gives the flip side: the company has grown faster than it could easily manage, and there is not a lot of process yet.
All roles are listed on the careers page and applications go through the posting on Ashby. Salary ranges in postings often span several career levels and are narrowed during interviews based on experience and location, so expect a leveling conversation. Interviews with hiring managers can turn technical without warning: one Glassdoor candidate reported 30 minutes of SQL questions in what they expected to be an intro call. Runpod also hires from its own communities. Desrosiers got his job because Lu spotted a contribution he made in a server-building forum, and Lu told him "I believe in you, in the person, beyond your current knowledge, beyond your experience."
Most current openings are remote within the US, with a few EMEA roles. Location rules are stated per posting: the EU technical support role must be based in Ireland, the UK, Spain or Poland and requires weekend availability, and the EMEA forward deployed engineer role must be located in EMEA.
Community Cloud is GPU compute supplied by vetted third-party hosts at lower prices (from under $0.50 an hour); Secure Cloud runs in data centers for teams that need compliance. Neither charges egress fees, and a Hub marketplace of ready-made models and templates lets developers deploy without writing infrastructure code.
Every posting carries a base range. Current examples: full-stack software engineer $130,000 to $200,000, senior data engineer $175,000 to $220,000, senior product manager $175,000 to $225,000, engineering manager $175,000 to $250,000, director of infrastructure engineering $225,000 to $325,000, and technical support engineer (L2) $70,000 to $93,000 in the US or €70,000 to €82,500 in Europe. The EMEA forward deployed engineer role lists $100,000 to $180,000.
Glassdoor puts the average at 33 days across seven reported interviews, with a difficulty score of 3.7 out of 5. Sales director and IT systems engineer interviews were rated hardest, operations associate and sales engineer easiest.
The platform code is Python, TypeScript and Go, with the original control plane written in Go. The data team runs dbt and Dagster on Snowflake with Mode for BI. The fleet mixes NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, and the storage layer spans network volumes, local NVMe and S3-compatible object storage across regions.
Runpod has not published profit figures. It ran on customer revenue alone for its first two years, and Sacra estimates gross margins in the mid-60s to high-70s percent with the company operating near breakeven to fund expansion.
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Describe your next role, cut the noise