Design partner
One of a small number of teams with heavy, bursty AI jobs who would work with the E31 Network program at the engineering level before it opens. Intake is not yet open.
· 2 min read
IN SHORT
A design partner is one of a small number of teams with heavy, bursty AI jobs who would work with the E31 Network program at the engineering level before the network opens, describing real jobs precisely and running them for real when the time comes. The program's open problems can only be answered with real jobs. Design-partner intake is not yet open, and there is no form.
A design partner is one of a small number of teams with heavy, bursty AI jobs who would work with the E31 Network program at the engineering level before the network opens: describing real jobs precisely, shaping what a job must declare, and running those jobs for real when the time comes. Intake is not yet open.
Why it matters
A compute network cannot be designed well in the abstract. The open problems the program lists, including fair scheduling of mixed job sizes, getting large datasets to where the compute is, and exactly what a job must declare, are all questions that only real jobs can answer. A design partner brings a real job.
The program is deliberately narrow. A team that needs steady compute every day is better served by owning it, and a team whose work must answer in the moment has no job to submit. The teams the program is looking for are the ones whose need is heavy some of the time and light most of the time, who can write their job down as work, data, request, and output, and who would rather help shape the thing than wait for it.
How it works on E31 Network
E31 Network is a technical preview. No jobs can be submitted, no rates are published, and design-partner intake is not yet open. There is no form and no waitlist. The design partners page describes the profile the program is looking for and states plainly that intake has not begun.
When the program does open, the design intent is that a partner would engage directly with the engineering work. That means bringing a job that can be described in a sentence, such as "I need eight GPUs for four hours to process this dataset," and then working through what that sentence has to become for the job to be scheduled, run, and accounted for well.
In return, a design partner's jobs are the ones the scheduling, staging, and accounting designs would be tested against first. What the partner learns about describing its own work is useful whether or not the job ever leaves its own rack; teams that decide they want compute in-house have Czar, Element 31's sealed appliance, as the sibling product. The network is for the jobs that do not need to own compute, and design partners are how it would find out which jobs those are.
Related terms
Questions this raises
- How do I become a design partner?
- Intake is not yet open, and there is no form or waitlist. The design partners page describes the profile the program is looking for and states plainly that intake has not begun. Until it opens, the most useful preparation is to write down a real job as work, data, request, and output.
- What kind of team is a good fit?
- A team whose compute need is heavy some of the time and light most of the time: a model to retrain, a backlog of footage, a sweep of simulations, a dataset to process once. The team should be able to describe that job precisely and be willing to run it for real on the network.
- What does a design partner get?
- The design intent is engineering-level engagement: a partner's jobs would be the ones the scheduling, staging, and accounting designs are tested against first. Nothing commercial has been published, and no rates, credits, or terms should be assumed.
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