Senior Staff Software Engineer, Crusoe Energy Systems
Storage DPU
$245-290k
+ Restricted Stock Units and bonus
Renewable-powered AI infrastructure
Be an early applicant
Renewable-powered AI infrastructure
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$245-290k
+ Restricted Stock Units and bonus
1001+ employees
Company mission
To accelerate the abundance of energy and intelligence.
Role
Who you are
- 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
- 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with deep, hands-on systems-level programming (C, C++, or Rust) and production experience in Go, Java, or similar for control-plane/orchestration work
- Direct, hands-on experience with SmartNICs/DPUs in production — NVIDIA BlueField (2/3), Intel IPU, ConnectX 6/7, or comparable hardware-offload platforms
- Working knowledge of NVMe-oF, RDMA/RoCE/InfiniBand, and the storage protocols DPU offload commonly accelerates
- Experience with kernel-bypass and hardware-offload techniques: SR-IOV, vDPA, virtio (virtio-blk/virtio-fs), XDP/eBPF, or DPDK/SPDK
- Strong Linux systems background — kernel internals, device drivers, I/O subsystems — sufficient to debug issues that span host, hypervisor, and DPU
- Experience contributing to at least one of file, block, or object storage systems, and genuine comfort working alongside (not reimplementing) mature storage data planes
- Demonstrated ability to work across team boundaries — this role sits at the intersection of Storage, Networking, and Compute, and will not succeed as a purely heads-down IC function
- Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science, Engineering, or related discipline
Desirable
- Direct experience with NVIDIA DOCA, BlueField SNAP, or other DPU-native storage-virtualization frameworks
- Experience building or operating NVMe-oF target/initiator offload in production
- Prior work on multi-tenant hardware isolation (SR-IOV/vDPA) in a cloud or hyperscale environment
- Familiarity with GPUDirect Storage or other GPU-to-storage data-path optimizations relevant to AI/HPC workloads
- Open-source contributions to DPDK, SPDK, Open vSwitch, or similar projects
What the job involves
- Crusoe is building a globally distributed, high-performance storage platform purpose-built for AI/HPC workloads
- We're looking for a Senior Staff Software Engineer to own how Crusoe's storage stack uses DPUs (NVIDIA BlueField-class SmartNICs) and related hardware offload to move that work off the host CPU and onto purpose-built silicon
- This is a software-defined-acceleration role sitting at the boundary between our storage data plane and the physical network/compute fabric — you'll design and build the control-plane and data-plane software that lets Crusoe's storage stack take advantage of hardware offload for NVMe-oF, RDMA, and related protocol-level work, in close partnership with the Storage Networking and Compute/Hypervisor teams
- You will set technical direction for DPU/offload strategy within Storage, work hands-on across the host/DPU boundary, and partner closely with the storage-networking, and Compute hypervisor-level DPU function
- Hardware Offload for Storage Protocols: Design and implement software that offloads storage-protocol work (NVMe-oF target/initiator processing, encryption, compression, checksums, erasure coding) from the host CPU onto DPUs/SmartNICs, measurably reducing host CPU overhead per I/O
- Control-Plane Integration: Build and maintain the integration between Crusoe's storage orchestration layer and DPU-resident services, including provisioning, health/telemetry, and failover of offload paths
- Cross-Team Fabric Work: Partner with the storage-networking function on the RDMA/RoCE and NVMe-oF fabric work that DPU offload depends on, and with Compute/Hypervisor on SR-IOV/vDPA-based virtualization of DPU resources for multi-tenant isolation
- Vendor Framework Integration: Evaluate and integrate vendor DPU SDKs and frameworks (e.g., NVIDIA DOCA, BlueField SNAP) to accelerate storage virtualization (virtio-blk/virtio-fs offload) without building bespoke firmware from zero
- Observability & Testing: Build monitoring and testing infrastructure specific to DPU-offloaded paths — this is new surface area for the team, and strong tooling here determines how fast we can safely iterate
- Performance Benchmarking: Drive IOPS/throughput/latency benchmarking and quantify host-CPU-cycles-saved per offloaded operation, to make the case for where offload investment pays off next
- Technical Point of Contact: Serve as the storage team's technical lead on DPU-related architecture decisions, including with hardware vendors
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 almost $1.4B in its 2025 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
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
Union Station, 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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