Staff Software Engineer, Crusoe Energy Systems
K8s
$204-247k
+ Restricted Stock Units + Bonus
Office located in Sunnyvale, CA
Renewable-powered AI infrastructure
Open for applications
Renewable-powered AI infrastructure
501-1000 employees
Open for applications
$204-247k
+ Restricted Stock Units + Bonus
Office located in Sunnyvale, CA
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To accelerate the abundance of energy and intelligence.
Role
Who you are
- 7+ years in infrastructure engineering, including 3+ years operating Kubernetes in production
- Strong experience running Kubernetes on bare metal (not just managed services)
- Expert-level knowledge of Linux internals (cgroups, namespaces, kernel networking)
- Deep experience with CNIs (Cilium, Calico), load balancers (Envoy, HAProxy, F5), and L3 networking (BGP, ECMP)
- Proven track record provisioning and operating physical servers at scale (PXE/iPXE, Tinkerbell, MAAS, BMC/IPMI automation)
- Strong programming skills in Go for building operators, controllers, and automation tooling
- Hands-on experience with distributed storage systems (Ceph, MinIO, Rook, CSI drivers)
- Strong background in observability (Prometheus, Alertmanager, metrics autoscaling, logging/ELK)
- Familiarity with PKI, identity, and secrets management (Vault, cert-manager)
- Excellent debugging skills for complex distributed systems
- Strong communication and collaboration across cross-functional teams
Desirable
- Experience with hardware fleet management across multiple datacenters
- Contributions to open source Kubernetes or related ecosystem projects
- Experience implementing disaster recovery strategies at scale
- Familiarity with GPUs, HPC clusters, or large-scale AI/ML workloads
What the job involves
- We are looking for a highly skilled engineer with deep experience running Kubernetes at scale on bare metal
- You will help design, build, and operate Crusoe’s next-generation Kubernetes platform across global datacenters, ensuring performance, reliability, and automation at every layer of the stack
- Designing, building, and operating Kubernetes clusters on bare metal at scale
- Engineering full cluster lifecycle management (Talos bootstrapping, upgrades, node reprovisioning, HA control planes, recovery workflows)
- Architecting networking, load balancing, and service mesh solutions optimized for bare metal
- Implementing performant CNIs (Calico, Cilium), integrating L2/L3 networking, routing (BGP/ECMP), and optimizing traffic across racks and datacenters
- Automating provisioning via PXE/iPXE, Tinkerbell, MAAS, and managing BMCs/IPMI/Redfish with standardized BIOS/firmware across heterogeneous hardware fleets
- Designing and operating persistent storage (local disks, block, object) including Ceph, Rook, and openEBS
- Building automation and tooling (Go, Python, Bash) for provisioning, drift detection, upgrades, and incident response
- Extending observability with Prometheus, Alertmanager, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, and defining SLOs for cluster health, latency, and workload availability
- Implementing security best practices: Vault, cert-manager, RBAC hardening, network policies, and OS/K8s patch pipelines
- Mentoring engineers and shaping technical direction for Crusoe’s Kubernetes platform
Our take
Crusoe is tackling one of the biggest challenges facing the digital age: the enormous energy demand of data centres and AI infrastructure. As AI models grow more powerful, they require immense computing power (and therefor electricity) to train and operate. This surge in energy use has put some pressure on power grids, driven up costs, and raised environmental concerns. Crusoe is on a mission to make this process more sustainable by finding smarter, cleaner, and more efficient ways to power the data centres that drive modern computing.
The company started out by putting wasted energy to work. Originally known as Crusoe Energy, it captured natural gas that would otherwise be burned off ("flared") at remote oil sites and used it to power modular data centres. Today, Crusoe has evolved into a major player in AI infrastructure, designing and operating large-scale data centres near renewable or stranded energy sources. It's now one of a handful of "neocloud" companies (next-generation cloud providers focused on flexible, efficient computing for AI workloads). And its facilities are helping tech giants like OpenAI handle the massive computing requirements of training advanced AI models.
Recently, Crusoe has attracted some huge investor attention, tripling its valuation to over $10B and raising $1.4B in its latest funding round. It's building OpenAI's first major US data centre campus and even experimenting with bold new frontiers. In partnership with Starcloud, Crusoe plans to deploy the world's first space-based cloud computing infrastructure, powered by solar energy and orbiting the Earth by 2027. If successful, this could redefine how and where computing happens, opening up a cleaner, virtually limitless source of energy for AI's next generation.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
31% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
Oct 2025
$1.4bn
SERIES E
Dec 2024
$600m
SERIES D
Total funding: $2.5bn
Company benefits
- Health & wellbeing: Comprehensive health benefits designed to support your overall wellness
- Time away: Paid time off for vacations, family bonding, and unexpected needs
- 401(k) match: Build your financial future with our 401(k) matching program
- Mental wellness: Resources and support for your emotional wellbeing and navigating life's challenges
Company HQ
LoDo, Denver, CO
Leadership
Cully Cavness
(Co-Founder, COO & President)Began their career as an Energy Infrastructure Research Fellow before spending 3 years as a Business Development Manager at Recurrent Engineering and serving as CFO of Sword & Plough. They left their role as VP of Highlands Natural Resources to co-found Crusoe Energy Systems.
Chase Lochmiller
(Co-Founder & CEO)Prior to co-founding Crusoe in 2018, Chase was a General Partner at Polychain Capital, a Quantitative Trade at Jump Trading Group, and a Managing Director of Algorithmic Trading at KCG Holdings.
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