Staff Software Engineer, Crusoe Container Registry

AI Chopping Block; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); On-site; USD 215,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity packages

Restricted Stock Units

Paid time off

Health insurance

HSA contributions

Parental leave

Life insurance

Tuition reimbursement

Mental health support

Commuter benefits

401(k) matching

Volunteer time off

Travel insurance

Meals allowance

Job summary

Crusoe is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to advance Crusoe Cloud's container registry, ensuring fast, reliable deployment readiness as the platform scales. You will own registry evolution, drive scaling, and be accountable for performance and resilience in production. This is a full-time role.

You will lead architecture decisions, drive end-to-end changes, and mentor teammates while collaborating with product partners to align priorities as demand grows.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software development experience, including distributed systems.
• Experience designing, scaling, and hardening distributed systems in production.
• Proven ability to profile, benchmark, and optimize performance at scale.
• Thrives transforming ambiguous performance problems into durable fixes.
• Customer-centric mindset with ability to translate needs into code changes.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical direction: set architecture and scaling roadmap for Crusoe Cloud's container registry.
• Ship end-to-end: drive high-impact changes from design through production.
• Push performance limits: define performance strategy and optimize latency, throughput, and caching at scale.
• Multiply the team: mentor engineers and raise the team's technical bar while staying hands-on.
• Drive technical strategy across teams: align with product and partners on priorities and tradeoffs.

Skills

Distributed systems

Performance mindset

Ambiguity handling

System ownership

Customer-centric mindset

Tech & infra proficiency

Collaboration & communication

Mentorship

Experience 8+ years

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform

Go

Rust

Java

C++

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:

We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to help make Crusoe Cloud's container registry fast and reliable as the platform grows. The registry sits on the critical path of every deployment and job launch on our platform, and its performance directly affects how quickly customer workloads come online. You'll own the evolution of the registry, drive its scaling roadmap, and be accountable for how it performs, degrades, and recovers in production. This is a full-time position.

What You'll Be Working On:

• Own the technical direction: Set the architecture and scaling roadmap for Crusoe Cloud's container registry. Establish the patterns and standards the team builds against, and stay accountable for scalability, reliability, and maintainability over the long haul.
• Ship end-to-end: Drive high impact changes from design through production, and stay accountable for their scalability, reliability and maintainability.
• Push performance limits: Drive performance strategy across the system and get ahead of demand curves before they reach customers. Make the architecture tradeoffs that keep the registry dependable as it grows.
• Multiply the team: Raise the team's technical bar through architecture, design, and code review, and through mentorship, while staying hands-on on complex challenges. Make the engineers around you more effective, not just yourself.
• Drive technical strategy across teams: Influence designs across adjacent teams, align with product and other partners on priorities and tradeoffs, and lead the technical response when things break.

What You'll Bring to the Team:

• Distributed systems at scale: You have proven success designing, scaling, and hardening distributed systems, all while keeping them reliable under high-load production environments.
• A performance-driven mindset: You set performance strategy and have deep, practical experience profiling, benchmarking, and optimizing distributed systems, with sound judgment about latency, throughput, caching, and resource tradeoffs at scale.
• Thrive in ambiguity: You thrive on transforming ambiguous performance problems into measured action and durable fixes. You work ahead of demand, identifying constraints before they reach customers.
• A track record of system level ownership: You've owned critical systems from design through production and carried them through operational pressure. You've made difficult calls under conflicting requirements and visible risk, and stood behind them.
• A customer-centric mindset: You keep the customers top of mind, and you can translate their needs into actionable changes in the codebase.
• Technical & infrastructure proficiency: You havestrong fundamentals in microservices and cloud-native infrastructure technologies (Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform) alongside languages like Go, Rust, Java, or C++.
• Collaboration and communication: You are comfortable working across functions to align on priorities and to explain technical tradeoffs clearly to technical and non-technical partners alike.
• Mentorship and force multiplication: You’ve grown other engineers. You’ve mentored teammates on the team's systems, helped newer engineers find their footing, raised the team’s technical bar, and contributed to hiring.
• Experience: You have8+ years of professional software development experience, including time spent building and operating distributed systems but we care more about what you've built than the exact number.

We know great engineers come from many different paths. If you're excited about this work but don't match every point below, we'd still love to hear from you. What you've built and how you think matters more to us than a perfect checklist.

Bonus Points

• Familiarity with the OCI image and distribution specs
• Experience building container registry products
• Experience with storage or caching systems at scale

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 $215,000 -$260,000 + 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.