Principal Engineer, AI Model LifeCycle

Crusoe•San Francisco, CA

1d•$256,000 - $320,000

About The Position

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).

Requirements

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.
Experience in Generative AI (Large Language Models, Multimodal).
Deep experience with AI infrastructure, including training, inference.

Nice To Haves

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
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.

Responsibilities

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.

Benefits

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 $256,000 - $320,000 + 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.