Staff Software Engineer (Backend Engineer + Streaming)

Crusoe • Sunnyvale, CA

1d • $209,000 - $253,000

About The Position

We're looking for a Staff Streaming Software Engineer to join the Observability team within our Cloud Infrastructure organization. This team builds and operates the real-time data platforms that power metrics, logs, traces, and event streams used by engineers across the company to understand and operate Crusoe's AI cloud reliably at scale.
In this role, you'll set the technical direction for our high-throughput streaming systems, driving architectural decisions and long-term investments across the observability stack. You'll operate at the intersection of deep technical execution and organizational influence—identifying gaps before they become problems, shaping how teams build and operate streaming infrastructure, and partnering with engineering leaders to align platform strategy with company goals.
This is an opportunity to define how observability data moves at scale across a rapidly growing AI cloud, and to leave a lasting architectural footprint on systems that the entire engineering organization depends on.

Requirements

• Deep experience architecting and operating distributed streaming or real-time data platforms at significant scale
• A track record of driving technical decisions that have lasting, cross-team impact—not just building features but shaping how systems are designed
• Hands-on expertise with Kafka or similar distributed streaming technologies, including operational experience in production at scale
• Proficiency in backend languages such as Java, Scala, Go, or Python
• Strong instincts for reliability engineering: you think in failure modes, SLOs, and systemic improvements
• Demonstrated ability to lead complex, ambiguous projects from problem definition through production, working across multiple teams and stakeholders
• Experience influencing engineering culture and technical standards beyond your immediate team
• Strong communication skills—you can make the case for long-horizon investments to both engineers and engineering leaders

Nice To Haves

• Experience building or owning observability platforms at cloud or data center scale
• Familiarity with stream processing frameworks, exactly-once semantics, and schema management
• Experience with Kubernetes and large-scale containerized infrastructure
• Exposure to data contracts, serialization formats, or schema registries
• Experience with bare-metal infrastructure or large-scale data center environments
• History of growing senior engineers into technical leads

Responsibilities

• Defining the technical strategy and multi-quarter roadmap for streaming infrastructure that ingests and processes observability data including logs, metrics, traces, and operational events
• Leading architectural design for large-scale, high-throughput streaming systems using technologies such as Kafka, Kinesis, Pub/Sub, Flink, or similar platforms—setting standards that scale across teams
• Driving solutions to the hardest reliability and scalability challenges: high-cardinality workloads, bursty traffic patterns, cross-region data movement, and fault-tolerant delivery semantics
• Partnering with SREs, platform teams, and product engineering to define how streaming data integrates into internal observability tooling and operational workflows company-wide
• Establishing engineering best practices around instrumentation, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, and incident management for streaming systems
• Leading post-incident reviews and contributing systemic improvements that reduce toil and improve platform resilience across teams
• Representing the observability platform in cross-functional technical forums and influencing decisions that span the broader Cloud Infrastructure organization
• Mentoring and leveling up senior engineers through design reviews, technical feedback, and hands-on collaboration

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 per month

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 251-500 employees