Staff Software Engineer, Applied Training

CoreWeave•Sunnyvale, WA

5d•Onsite

About The Position

CoreWeave is The Essential Cloud for AI™. Built for pioneers by pioneers, CoreWeave delivers a platform of technology, tools, and teams that enables innovators to build and scale AI with confidence. Trusted by leading AI labs, startups, and global enterprises, CoreWeave combines superior infrastructure performance with deep technical expertise to accelerate breakthroughs and turn compute into capability. Founded in 2017, CoreWeave became a publicly traded company (Nasdaq: CRWV) in March 2025. Learn more at www.coreweave.com . What You'll Do: A lab signs with CoreWeave. They have thousands of GPUs waiting. Their first month? Spent on cluster setup instead of research. Building deployment scripts, fighting container images, wiring up job orchestration. They came to train models. Instead, they're doing operations. This is the problem. We're building the Applied Training team to fix it. You'll be an early member of a small team, responsible for our Kubernetes-native research cluster platform, or the sandbox client for agentic training and evaluation, or possibly a new project altogether. The goal is specific: give every CoreWeave customer the research infrastructure that currently only exists inside frontier labs. In this role, you will: Contribute to the roadmap for Applied Training — figure out what actually unlocks new workloads and what's just nice to have Work directly and closely with customers, and other teams inside CoreWeave that are building cloud native primitives: compute, storage, networking, etc. For the research cluster platform: design and build a complete research cluster experience — CLI, job configuration schema, Kubernetes operators, daemons — solving the problems researchers actually hit: code distribution, checkpoint-triggered evaluation, cross-cluster scheduling, programmatic job control For sandbox infrastructure: own the Python SDK and work in a tight loop with the backend team, enabling RL training runs to spawn thousands of isolated containers for agent rollouts and agent benchmarks at scale Write documentation for running popular OSS training frameworks on CoreWeave to unblock customers and help them succeed Work with infrastructure teams and customers directly — the customers are large AI labs running thousands of GPUs; understand how they structure their internal supercomputing stacks and bring that knowledge back to what we build

Requirements

8–12+ years building distributed systems, ML infrastructure, or developer platforms
Real Kubernetes experience: custom controllers, operators, scheduling, CRDs, workload orchestration at scale — not just deploying things to Kubernetes or cluster administration
You understand what makes researchers productive: code distribution matters, fast iteration cycles matter, workflows that don't require becoming infrastructure experts matter
Familiarity with training: how distributed jobs get scheduled, how ranks initialize, what breaks at scale
You've shipped infrastructure that other people rely on daily — not prototypes, production systems
Strong communicator who can work with customers and translate researcher complaints into system designs

Nice To Haves

Experience building internal ML platforms or research clusters at a company doing large-scale training
Familiarity with agentic AI: RL training with rollouts, agent evaluation, sandbox isolation for running untrusted code
Background with Slurm, Ray, or similar workload orchestration, and opinions on where they fall short
Experience with container runtimes, isolation (gVisor, Kata), or serverless platforms
OSS contributions to Kubernetes SIGs, Ray, PyTorch, or similar

Responsibilities

Contribute to the roadmap for Applied Training — figure out what actually unlocks new workloads and what's just nice to have
Work directly and closely with customers, and other teams inside CoreWeave that are building cloud native primitives: compute, storage, networking, etc.
For the research cluster platform: design and build a complete research cluster experience — CLI, job configuration schema, Kubernetes operators, daemons — solving the problems researchers actually hit: code distribution, checkpoint-triggered evaluation, cross-cluster scheduling, programmatic job control
For sandbox infrastructure: own the Python SDK and work in a tight loop with the backend team, enabling RL training runs to spawn thousands of isolated containers for agent rollouts and agent benchmarks at scale
Write documentation for running popular OSS training frameworks on CoreWeave to unblock customers and help them succeed
Work with infrastructure teams and customers directly — the customers are large AI labs running thousands of GPUs; understand how they structure their internal supercomputing stacks and bring that knowledge back to what we build