Home › Jobs › Crusoe › Cloud Engineering

Principal Engineer, CAPE

Crusoe San Francisco, CA - US FullTime Cloud Engineering Posted 3w+ ago
Apply Now →

Culture signals in this specific role

Inferred from the employer’s wording in this job description. These role-level signals are separate from the company-wide employee-review scores below.

OwnershipThe description emphasizes ownership or end-to-end responsibility.
Fast-pacedThe wording signals a fast-moving environment with changing priorities.
Deep technical workThe role highlights substantial technical, research, or systems work.

What it’s like to work at Crusoe

AI Cloud & Clean Energy · Denver

3.4
Employee Rating
3.3
Work-Life Balance
354
Open Roles
ship-fastsocial-impacteng-drivenequity

What employees love

  • Unique mission combining AI compute with clean energy — employees feel genuine environmental impact
  • Strong compensation and equity with startup energy and rapidly growing resources

What could be better

  • Startup pace means long hours and ambiguity — not for people who want strict 9-to-5
  • Rapid scaling creates process gaps, shifting priorities, and some organizational chaos
View full Crusoe culture profile →

About the Role

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.

Conductor is the platform we're building: a self-driving fleet.


Most infrastructure teams watch dashboards and replace dead nodes after they fail. We're building something different — a control plane that predicts, decides, and acts on its own, keeping tens of thousands of accelerators doing useful work at the highest goodput in the industry while optimizing power and cost in real time. The mandate for this role is to make the fleet self-driving.


This is a Principal Engineer role reporting into Cloud Availability, working directly on one of the highest-priority technical charters in the org.


Your Charter — The Problems You'll Own

  1. Unified observability plane. One pane that correlates GPU, networking (InfiniBand/RoCE), storage, orchestration, and workload signals — so any engineer can diagnose and recover jobs fast.

  2. The fleet as one logical computer. Tens of thousands of accelerators across sites behaving as a single programmable system: one health model, one scheduler, one source of truth.

  3. Closed-loop autonomy, not alerting. Diagnose, decide, and remediate with no human in the loop — drain, checkpoint, replace, and resume a live job automatically. The hard part: earning enough trust to act on a running job.

  4. Goodput as an objective function. Don't just measure useful compute — continuously maximize it, trading scheduling, placement, and maintenance decisions against it as the north-star metric.

  5. Predict failures hours ahead, not seconds after. Forecast GPU, NVLink, optics, and thermal degradation before it stalls a job, and pre-emptively migrate work. An ML problem on noisy hardware telemetry at fleet scale.

  6. Straggler & silent-failure detection. One slow GPU stalls an entire distributed job — isolate the exact rank, GPU, and node from collective-operation signals and surface root cause fast.

  7. Energy-aware compute. Because we own the power stack, schedule, throttle, and place workloads against real-time energy availability, cost, and thermal headroom. The problem you can work on here and nowhere else.

  8. A digital twin of the fleet. Simulate failures, scheduling policies, and remediation logic before they touch production — the foundation that makes real autonomy safe.

  9. Agentic operations. An agent that doesn't just answer "why is this job slow" but proposes and executes the fix, with guardrails and a full audit trail.

  10. Zero-trust, fully auditable multi-tenancy. Every action — human or autonomous — identity-scoped, policy-checked, and streamed to customer audit systems in real time.

  11. Self-qualifying hardware. New and repaired nodes prove themselves through automated burn-in before taking customer load. Fleet growth becomes a software-gated pipeline.

Why This Role Is Different

What You'll Bring

Benefits:

Compensation Range

Compensation will be paid in the range of up to $285,000 - $335,000 + 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.

Similar Roles

More at Crusoe
Applied AI Inference Engineer
San Francisco, CA - US
›
Senior Production Engineer
San Francisco, CA - US
›
Senior Staff Software Engineer, Managed Platform Services
San Francisco, CA - US
›
Staff Hardware Systems Engineer
San Francisco, CA - US
›
Production Engineer (Kubernetes)
Dublin - IE
›

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the work-life balance like at Crusoe?
Crusoe has a work-life balance score of 3.3/5 based on employee reviews. This is below average, which may indicate a fast-paced, demanding work environment.
What is Crusoe’s culture like?
Crusoe is characterized by these culture values: ship-fast, social-impact, eng-driven, equity. Based on employee reviews, the company has an overall rating of 3.4/5. Unique mission combining AI compute with clean energy — employees feel genuine environmental impact
How many open roles does Crusoe have?
Crusoe currently has 354 open roles across departments including engineering, product, sales, and more. Roles are refreshed daily from their careers page.
Is this role remote-friendly?
This role is located in San Francisco, CA - US. Check the job description above for specific location and remote work details.
Apply for this role at Crusoe →