An outline of the improvements to the pseudospectral electronic structure program Jaguar is presented, showing efficient and robust performance of hybrid‐DFT calculations for large systems with thousands of basis functions, focusing on materials applications. The improvements include re‐engineered parallelization, the design of a fragment‐based initial guess generation method, and the validation of small eigenvalue cutoff values. An OpenMP/MPI hybrid parallelization has been implemented for the pseudospectral algorithm, which extends Jaguar's scalability to up to 256 cores in tests of TiO2 clusters with 1295‐4961 basis functions. In the largest test case, the code delivers 84.4× speedup for 128 cores in total calculation time. In addition, a fragment‐based initial guess method has been constructed for large systems containing many transition metals, where the conventional (atomic) approach often fails. Overall, Jaguar is now capable of efficiently and robustly performing hybrid‐DFT geometrical optimizations for large systems with more than 600 atoms in reasonable runtimes. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.