{"id":1117340,"url":"https://alion.io/job/crusoe-senior-staff-applied-ai-inference-engineer","title":"Senior Staff Applied AI Inference Engineer","company":{"id":48024,"name":"Crusoe","domain":"crusoe.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/crusoe-ai","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":84,"open_postings":44,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.636,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":56,"computed_at":"2026-10-19T05:45:15Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":250000,"max":300000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":300000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"CUDA","optional":false},{"name":"CUDA Toolkit","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"SGLang","optional":false},{"name":"vLLM","optional":false},{"name":"Docker","optional":true},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-22T16:20:41Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-22","last_verified_at":"2026-10-19T14:48:04Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":27,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":27},"description":"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.\nWe'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.\nWe'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.\nIf 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.\nAbout the Role\nYou will spend your time making large language models run faster, cheaper, and more reliably in production. That means owning the inference stack end to end: profiling where time and cost go, bringing modern optimization techniques into real deployments, and getting deep into the serving code when the defaults are not good enough. This is core systems and performance work on some of the most demanding models in use today.\nThe work is applied, not academic. The optimizations you build land in real customer deployments, each with its own models, traffic patterns, latency targets, and cost constraints. So while performance is the heart of the role, you will also work directly with customer engineering teams to tailor deployments to their needs, take a workload from an early proof of concept to a fully monitored production service, and make sure the gains you engineer actually show up for the people running the workload.\nTo set expectations clearly, this is a hands-on engineering role built around coding, profiling, and low-level optimization. It also carries a customer-facing side, along with elements of product and technical solutions work, because that is where the performance work gets proven.\nWhat You'll Be Working On:\nBring current inference techniques into production and refine them.\n\nDesign and optimize serving architectures, including prefill and decode disaggregation, request routing, and related approaches.\n\nWork down into the serving stack, from frameworks like vLLM and SGLang to the CUDA kernels underneath, profiling and running in-depth analysis to find and fix performance problems.\n\nAdapt and scale optimization methods across many kinds of ML models, with an emphasis on large language models.\n\nProfile and tune deployments against clear targets for latency, throughput, and cost, and keep them dependable under real traffic.\n\nTailor deployments to each customer's models and constraints, partnering with their engineering teams to move a workload from an early proof of concept through to a live, well-monitored production service.\n\nBuild and support the software and product features around the inference stack in a production setting, using one or more general-purpose languages, with Python preferred given how central it is to ML work.\n\nExperiment quickly: take fuzzy goals, shape them into clear specs and focused proofs of concept, run fast experiments to find what works, and ship well-tested results without delay.\n\nOwn delivery end to end, from the first experiment through to the optimization running in production, keeping the underlying performance goals, clear specs, and follow-through front of mind, and drafting features and product requirement documents together with other engineering and product teams.\n\nWork through ambiguity and make sound calls on tradeoffs and tooling, steering away from complexity that is not needed.\n\nTake real pride and ownership in your work, hold yourself accountable, and look for the same from the people around you.\n\nWhat You'll Bring to the Team:\nA Bachelor's, Master's, or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field.\n\nHands-on experience shipping code in production with one or more general-purpose languages, such as Python or C++, with a strong preference for Python.\n\nFamiliarity with methods for optimizing LLMs for high throughput / low latency inference.\n\nComfort with modern LLM serving frameworks such as vLLM or SGLang, and with profiling and analyzing performance down to the kernel level.\n\nA firm grasp of how GPUs are built and how they behave.\n\nClear interest and hands-on experience with large language models.\n\nA working knowledge of AI/ML pipelines and the full path of developing and deploying ML models.\n\nStrong communication skills, particularly when explaining hard technical topics to customers and teammates.\n\nBonus points:\nA track record of making software systems run faster, especially for large language models.\n\nExperience with CUDA or comparable technologies.\n\nA strong command of software engineering fundamentals, with a record of building and shipping AI/ML inference systems.\n\nExperience with Docker and Kubernetes.\n\nPrior work building or tuning AI/ML projects, particularly in a customer-facing setting.\n\nBenefits:\nCompetitive compensation and equity packages\n\nRestricted Stock Units\n\nPaid time off, paid holidays & leave of absence programs\n\nComprehensive health, dental & vision insurance\n\nEmployer contributions to HSA account\n\nPaid parental leave\n\nPaid life insurance, short-term and long-term disability\n\nProfessional development & tuition reimbursement\n\nMental health & wellness support\n\nCommuter benefits (parking & transit)\n\nCell phone stipend\n\n401(k) Retirement plan with company match up to 4% of salary\n\nVolunteer time off\n\nGlobal travel insurance & emergency assistance\n\nDaily meals allowance\n\nAdditional perks & programs specific to location\n\nCompensation Range\nCompensation will be paid in the range of up to $250,000 - $300,000 + Bonus. Restricted Stock Units are included in all offers. Compensation to be determined by the applicant's knowledge, education, and abilities, as well as internal equity and alignment with market data.\nCrusoe 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.","description_format":"text","description_chars":6727,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Life insurance","Parental leave","Professional development","Restricted stock units","Retirement plans","Vision insurance"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Data Centers & Colocation","AI Compute & Inference"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-22T16:58:08Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":55,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.614,"p_room":0.9,"age_days":26,"expected_fill_days":56,"reasons":["conf:2","stale_co","velocity","win:mid","comp:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-19T05:45:15Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":300000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/crusoe-senior-staff-applied-ai-inference-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/crusoe-senior-staff-applied-ai-inference-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-19T17:03:51Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":12940,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-20T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":48024},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=48024"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fcrusoe-senior-staff-applied-ai-inference-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fcrusoe-senior-staff-applied-ai-inference-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fcrusoe-senior-staff-applied-ai-inference-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/crusoe-senior-staff-applied-ai-inference-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fcrusoe-senior-staff-applied-ai-inference-engineer"}]}