Principal Engineer, AI Model LifeCycle
Crusoe
Software Engineering, Data Science
San Francisco, CA, USA
Posted on Mar 6, 2026
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:
The Principal Software Engineer for the Model LifeCycle team will play a crucial role in building a comprehensive managed platform for the entire application development lifecycle, with a specific focus on leveraging Machine Learning models, including Large Language Models (LLMs).
What You will be working on:
Compensation will be paid in the range of up to $260,000 - $326,000 + Bonus. Restricted Stock Units are included in all offers. Compensation to be determined by the applicants 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.
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:
The Principal Software Engineer for the Model LifeCycle team will play a crucial role in building a comprehensive managed platform for the entire application development lifecycle, with a specific focus on leveraging Machine Learning models, including Large Language Models (LLMs).
What You will be working on:
- Manage fine-tuning systems for large foundation models (SFT, PEFT, LoRA, adapters), including multi-node orchestration, checkpointing, failure recovery, and cost-efficient scaling.
- Implement and maintain end-to-end training pipelines for Large Language Models.
- Distillation and reinforcement learning pipelines (e.g., preference optimization, policy optimization, reward modeling).
- Agent execution infrastructure
- Dataset, model, and experiment management: versioning, lineage, evaluation, and reproducible fine-tuning at scale.
- Work closely with product, business, and platform teams to shape the core abstractions and APIs of the system.
- Influence long-term architectural decisions around training runtimes, scheduling, storage, and model lifecycle management.
- Contribute to and engage with the open-source LLM ecosystem.
- This role offers significant 0 → 1 ownership — you'll be designing and building core systems from first principles.
- Strong Engineering Fundamentals:
- Advanced degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
- 10-15+ years of industry experience driving impactful projects in the AI Space
- Proven track record of delivering early-stage projects under tight deadlines.
- Expertise in using cloud-based services, such as, elastic compute, object storage, virtual private networks, managed database, etc.
- AI/ML Expertise:
- Experience in Generative AI (Large Language Models, Multimodal).
- Deep experience with AI infrastructure, including training, inference.
- Proficiency in Golang or Python for large-scale, production-level services.
- Contributions to open-source AI projects such as vLLM or similar frameworks.
- Performance optimizations on GPU systems and inference frameworks.
- Experience working with PyTorch
- Experience with training and fine-tuning LLMs
- Personal Attributes:
- Proactive and collaborative approach with the ability to work autonomously.
- Strong communication and interpersonal skills.
- Passion for building cutting-edge AI products and solving challenging technical problems.
- Industry competitive pay
- Restricted Stock Units in a fast growing, well-funded technology company
- Health insurance package options that include HDHP and PPO, vision, and dental for you and your dependents
- Employer contributions to HSA accounts
- Paid Parental Leave
- Paid life insurance, short-term and long-term disability
- Teladoc
- 401(k) with a 100% match up to 4% of salary
- Generous paid time off and holiday schedule
- Cell phone reimbursement
- Tuition reimbursement
- Subscription to the Calm app
- MetLife Legal
- Company paid commuter benefit; $300/month
Compensation will be paid in the range of up to $260,000 - $326,000 + Bonus. Restricted Stock Units are included in all offers. Compensation to be determined by the applicants 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.