Staff Software Engineer

Fluidstack; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Generous PTO policy

Retirement plan

Job summary

Fluidstack is seeking a software engineer to work on AI infrastructure projects in San Francisco. Responsibilities include building core system primitives and defining interactions with vendor systems.

The ideal candidate is fluent with AI tooling and has the ability to learn quickly in ambiguous environments. The position offers a competitive total compensation package including a base salary range of $150,000 - $250,000 per year, depending on experience.

Qualifications

• Fluent with AI tooling including LLM APIs and coding tools.
• Ability to work under ambiguity and learn quickly.
• Experience in turning unstructured data into usable formats.

Responsibilities

• Build core primitives for system operations.
• Define interfaces with vendor systems and ingest necessary formats.
• Turn Fluidstack's entities into composable models for long-term use.

Skills

Fluent with AI tooling

Experience in software engineering

Ability to handle ambiguity

Domain modeling skills

Experience with geospatial formats

Tools

Go

TypeScript

Postgres

Job description

About Fluidstack

We exist to make humanity more free. For most of human history, you farmed or you starved. Technology gave people more time for the things they wanted to do, instead of things they had to do. Powerful AI will be the biggest lever for human choice we've ever built - but only if models are aligned with what humanity actually wants. There are groups building AI who don't share these goals. Whoever deploys frontier compute infrastructure fastest will decide whether AI expands human freedom or shrinks it.

We're singularly focused on delivering 10 to 100s of GWs of compute faster than anyone else, rethinking every layer of the stack. We acquire power, design and build data centers, and operate them - with teams spanning hardware and software. Speed and scale are our key differentiators. Come be a part of building civilization-scale infrastructure for AI.

We hire people who care deeply about this problem space. If that is you, please apply!

How We Operate

• High ownership. Full autonomy. Own things end to end often taking on scope outside your core role without being asked to get things done.
• Velocity. We drive everything forward as fast as possible.
• First principles. Challenge every assumption. Zero analogy thinking, no egos, the best idea wins.
• Love of the game. The frontier of AI is the most interesting problem of our time. We put in long hours at high intensity to push the frontier forward.

The Software Engineering Team

Examples of key exciting problems the team is working on:

• We're building the pipeline that processes thousand-page vendor unstructured material against our own DC design to automate the generation of an end to end site design and schedule.
• We're building the live model of a AI infrastructure project’s entire delivery schedule, durable workflows handing off across every team, to replace static Gantt charts with a plan that updates itself as reality changes.
• We're building the agent platform that wraps AI in real authorization, audit, and guardrails, to let agents accelerate the development of infrastructure instead of just advising report on it.

Role Scope

• Build core primitives end to end. Entity ownership, audit, authorization, orchestration. You make the right thing the default and the wrong thing hard.
• Own the domain model. Turn Fluidstack's world of power, datacenters, and chips into composable entities that still hold up years from now.
• Define interactions with the outside. Interface with vendor systems and ingest the formats our domain actually speaks: KMZ, BIM, Revit, vendor docs.
• Make AI agents first-class operators of our systems. Give them the tools, guardrails, and audit trails to act safely, not just advise.

What We're Looking For

The below is a starting point. We always make space for exceptional people, so if you don't fit this role exactly, tell us where you would.

• You move toward ambiguity, not away from it. You walk into the fog, build the map, and explain it to everyone else.
• You learn at a steep slope. You reach real competence in an unfamiliar domain fast, whether it's a workflow engine, an authz model, or a geospatial format. We value this over existing expertise.
• You have taste in abstraction. You see the one primitive hiding under five janky one-offs, and you know when not to abstract.
• You model domains with rigor earned the hard way. You've gotten it wrong, felt the pain, and never forgot it.
• You pull structure out of mess. You've done real work turning messy, unstructured data into something usable, in ML, data engineering, or research.
• You're fluent with AI tooling. LLM APIs, MCP servers, and agentic frameworks, and you drive Claude Code, Cursor, or similar every day.
• You've shipped production code that other people depend on, and you're comfortable in any language using AI coding tools.
• Bonus: MLE work, especially extraction and synthesis from unstructured data. Workflow and orchestration engines (Temporal, Cadence, Airflow). Geospatial (KMZ/GIS) or BIM (Revit, IFC). Authorization and policy engines (OPA, Zanzibar-style, RBAC/ABAC). Audit or event-sourcing systems. Go, TypeScript, and Postgres.

Salary & Benefits

• Competitive total compensation package (salary + equity).
• Retirement or pension plan, in line with local norms.
• Health, dental, and vision insurance.
• Generous PTO policy, in line with local norms.

The base salary range for this position is $150,000 - $250,000 per year, depending on experience, skills, qualifications, and location. This range represents our good faith estimate of the compensation for this role at the time of posting. Total compensation may also include equity in the form of stock options.

We are committed to pay equity and transparency.

Fluidstack is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability and protected veterans’ status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Fluidstack will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records pursuant to applicable law.