Senior Manager, Engineering - AI Inference

Crusoe Energy Systems LLC; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 250,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation and equity

Restricted Stock Units

Paid time off, holidays & leave

Healthcare: medical, dental & vision

HSA contributions

Parental leave

Life insurance

Tuition reimbursement

Mental health support

Commuter benefits

Cell phone stipend

401(k) with company match

Volunteer time off

Global travel insurance

Daily meals allowance

Location-specific perks

Job summary

Crusoe Energy Systems LLC is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager in San Francisco to lead an ML inference optimization team. You will stay hands-on with the stack, profiling performance and deploying improvements in production for large language models and diverse workloads.

The role blends leadership with deep technical work, collaborating with customers to tailor deployments and delivering measurable performance gains in real-world environments.

Qualifications

• BS/MS/PhD in CS/Engineering/Math or related field.
• Hands-on production coding in Python or C++.
• Experience shipping ML inference systems.
• Familiarity with optimizing LLMs for throughput and latency.
• Understanding GPUs and kernel behavior.
• Strong communication with customers and teammates.

Responsibilities

• Bring current inference techniques into production and refine them.
• Design and optimize serving architectures for latency, throughput and cost.
• Dive into serving stack from frameworks to CUDA kernels to identify performance issues.
• Scale optimization methods across ML models, especially large language models.
• Profile and tune deployments to meet real production targets.
• Lead team delivery end-to-end and align with product and engineering leadership.

Skills

Team leadership

Python

C++

LLM optimization

GPU basics

Communication

Education

Bachelors, Masters, or PhD in CS/Engineering/Math

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

Crusoe is on a mission to accelerate the abundance of energy and intelligence. As the only vertically integrated AI infrastructure company built from the ground up, we own and operate each layer of the stack — from electrons to tokens — to power the world's most ambitious AI workloads. When you join Crusoe, you join a team that is building the future, faster.

We're in the midst of the greatest industrial revolution of our time. The demand for AI compute is boundless, and power is a bottleneck. We're solving that — with an energy-first approach that makes AI infrastructure better for the world and faster for the people innovating with AI.

We're looking for problem-solving, opportunity-finding teammates with a sense of urgency, who believe in the scale of our ambition and thrive on a path not fully paved — people who want to grow their careers alongside a team of experts across energy, manufacturing, data center construction, and cloud services.

If you want to do the most meaningful work of your career, help our customers and partners advance their AI strategies, and be part of a high-performing team that believes in each other, come build with us at Crusoe.

About the Role:

As a Senior Engineering Manager, you will lead an engineering team focused on making large language models run faster, cheaper, and more reliably in production. While managing and growing the team, you will stay deeply technical and hands‑on with the inference stack end to end: profiling performance, bringing modern optimization techniques into real deployments, and diving into serving code alongside your engineers. This role balances team leadership with core systems and performance engineering on demanding models in production.

The work is applied, not academic. The optimizations you build land in real customer deployments, each with its own models, traffic patterns, latency targets, and cost constraints. So while performance is the heart of the role, you will also work directly with customer engineering teams to tailor deployments to their needs, take a workload from an early proof of concept to a fully monitored production service, and make sure the gains you engineer actually show up for the people running the workload.

To set expectations clearly, this is an engineering leadership role that combines people management, technical direction, and hands‑on coding and profiling. It also carries a customer‑facing side, along with elements of product and technical solutions leadership, ensuring performance gains deliver clear business and customer value.

What You’ll Be Working On:

• Bring current inference techniques into production and refine them.
• Design and optimize serving architectures, including prefill and decode disaggregation, request routing, and related approaches.
• Work down into the serving stack, from frameworks like vLLM and SGLang to the CUDA kernels underneath, profiling and running in‑depth analysis to find and fix performance problems.
• Adapt and scale optimization methods across many kinds of ML models, with an emphasis on large language models.
• Profile and tune deployments against clear targets for latency, throughput, and cost, and keep them dependable under real traffic.
• Tailor deployments to each customer’s models and constraints, partnering with their engineering teams to move a workload from an early proof of concept through to a live, well‑monitored production service.
• Build and support the software and product features around the inference stack in a production setting, using one or more general‑purpose languages, with Python preferred given how central it is to ML work.
• Experiment quickly: take fuzzy goals, shape them into clear specs and focused proofs of concept, run fast experiments to find what works, and ship well‑tested results without delay.
• Lead team delivery end to end, guiding projects from early experiments to production optimizations, establishing performance goals, and partnering with product and engineering leaders on technical strategy and roadmaps.
• Work through ambiguity and make sound calls on tradeoffs and tooling, steering away from complexity that is not needed.
• Take real pride and ownership in your work, hold yourself accountable, and look for the same from the people around you.

What You’ll Bring to the Team:

• 2+ years of experience directly managing and leading an engineering team in a high‑performance or ML‑focused environment.
• Strong technical, hands‑on experience in software engineering, low‑level optimization, or ML infrastructure, with a continued desire to stay close to code and architecture.
• A Bachelor’s, Master’s, or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field.
• Hands‑on experience shipping code in production with one or more general‑purpose languages, such as Python or C++, with a strong preference for Python.
• Familiarity with methods for optimizing LLMs for high throughput / low latency inference.
• Comfort with modern LLM serving frameworks such as vLLM or SGLang, and with profiling and analyzing performance down to the kernel level.
• A firm grasp of how GPUs are built and how they behave.
• Clear interest and hands‑on experience with large language models.
• A working knowledge of AI/ML pipelines and the full path of developing and deploying ML models.
• Strong communication skills, particularly when explaining hard technical topics to customers and teammates.

Bonus Points

• A track record of making software systems run faster, especially for large language models.
• Experience with CUDA or comparable technologies.
• A strong command of software engineering fundamentals, with a record of building and shipping AI/ML inference systems.
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes.
• Prior work building or tuning AI/ML projects, particularly in a customer‑facing setting.

Benefits:

• Competitive compensation and equity packages
• Restricted Stock Units
• Paid time off, paid holidays & leave of absence programs
• Comprehensive health, dental & vision insurance
• Employer contributions to HSA account
• Paid parental leave
• Paid life insurance, short‑term and long‑term disability
• Professional development & tuition reimbursement
• Mental health & wellness support
• Commuter benefits (parking & transit)
• Cell phone stipend
• 401(k) Retirement plan with company match up to 4% of salary
• Volunteer time off
• Global travel insurance & emergency assistance
• Daily meals allowance
• Additional perks & programs specific to location

Compensation Range

Compensation will be paid in the range of up to $250,000 - $300,000 + Bonus. Restricted Stock Units are included in all offers. Compensation to be determined by the applicant’s knowledge, education, and abilities, as well as internal equity and alignment with market data.

Crusoe is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Employment decisions are made without regard to race, color, religion, disability, genetic information, pregnancy, citizenship, marital status, sex/gender, sexual preference/ orientation, gender identity, age, veteran status, national origin, or any other status protected by law or regulation.