Staff Software Engineer

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.

About the role:

• 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 of 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. Solve the problems researchers actually hit: code distribution, checkpoint-triggered evaluation, cross-cluster scheduling, programmatic job control. Replace the patchwork of scripts customers keep building on their own.
• For sandbox infrastructure: own the Python SDK and work in a very tight loop with the backend team. When an RL training run needs to spawn thousands of isolated containers for agent rollouts, that's this system. When someone wants to run agent benchmarks at scale, that's this system. Make it work with our Kubernetes clusters, storage, and auth so researchers don't have to think about infrastructure.
• Write the documentation for running popular OSS training frameworks on CoreWeave. The work that can 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. Bring that knowledge back to what we build.

Who You Are:

• 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.
• Excited about rigorous engineering, but enabled by AI based workflows.
• 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.
• Good communicator. Can work with customers, translate researcher complaints into system designs.

Preferred:

• 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. 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.

Wondering if you’re a good fit? We believe in investing in our people and value candidates who can bring their diverse experiences to our teams – even if you aren't a 100% skill or experience match.

Why CoreWeave?

At CoreWeave, we work hard, have fun, and move fast!  We’re in an exciting stage of hyper-growth that you will not want to miss out on. We’re not afraid of a little chaos, and we’re constantly learning. Our team cares deeply about how we build our product and how we work together, which is represented through our core values: 

• Be Curious at Your Core
• Act Like an Owner
• Empower Employees
• Deliver Best-in-Class Client Experiences
• Achieve More Together

We support and encourage an entrepreneurial outlook and independent thinking. We foster an environment that encourages collaboration and provides the opportunity to develop innovative solutions to complex problems. As we get set for takeoff, the growth opportunities within the organization are constantly expanding. You will be surrounded by some of the best talent in the industry, who will want to learn from you, too. Come join us!  

The base salary range for this role is $165,000 to $242,000. The starting salary will be determined based on job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and market location. We strive for both market alignment and internal equity when determining compensation. In addition to base salary, our total rewards package includes a discretionary bonus, equity awards, and a comprehensive benefits program (all based on eligibility).