Principal Software Engineer

About the Team

The Developer Experience team owns the services, systems, and developer-facing capabilities that enable every engineer at CoreWeave to build and ship software faster, more safely, and with greater confidence. Our scope spans the full developer lifecycle, including build infrastructure, test systems, delivery workflows, internal developer tooling, and agentic AI capabilities that are redefining how engineers move from idea to production. We operate at the scale of one of the world’s largest GPU clouds, which means our build, test, and delivery systems must handle extreme compute throughput, heterogeneous workloads, and the reliability demands of an infrastructure platform critical to thousands of engineers.

About the Role

This is a principal-level software engineering leadership role for an engineer who will define the long-term technical direction for Developer Experience across CoreWeave. You will operate across team boundaries, own the hardest software design and architecture problems in developer productivity, and shape the services, APIs, abstractions, and engineering standards that enable the organization to scale. Kubernetes is central to how CoreWeave’s eco system operates.

This role is ideal for someone who leads with deep software engineering skill first: someone who has built large-scale production software, designed distributed systems that hold up under real-world complexity, and knows how to turn developer productivity problems into elegant, durable software solutions. You should be equally comfortable setting technical strategy, writing and reviewing high-quality code, and guiding other senior engineers through ambiguous architectural decisions.

What You'll Do

• Define and drive the technical strategy for Developer Experience across build systems, test systems, delivery platforms, developer tooling, and agentic engineering capabilities.
• Own delivery at scale. Define and drive the strategy for how code goes from commit to production reliably and quickly. Attack the bottlenecks — CI/CD throughput, build and test times, deployment safety, rollback speed, and release orchestration — across a large, multi-team codebase.
• Architect and evolve the core services, APIs, SDKs, and software abstractions that power how engineers build, test, deploy, and operate software at CoreWeave.
• Lead cross-team technical initiatives that improve engineering velocity, software quality, and system reliability at organizational scale.
• Solve high-complexity software engineering problems involving distributed systems, service architecture, performance, scalability, concurrency, and failure handling.
• Identify systemic bottlenecks in developer workflows and design durable software solutions that reduce friction without increasing operational complexity.
• Establish technical standards and best practices for code quality, maintainability, testability, observability, and long-term system design across the engineering organization.
• Partner with infrastructure, security, SRE, and product engineering teams to ensure DevEx systems integrate cleanly into the broader technical ecosystem.
• Mentor senior engineers, raise the technical bar across teams, and help grow the next generation of staff-plus engineering leadership.
• Design agent-safe developer interfaces and tooling that integrate LLM-driven workflows into the build, test and code review lifecycle - ensuring automation, AI-assisted tooling and human-in-the-loop systems are first class , well governed parts of developer experience. 
• Define and maintain the internal developer platforms' golden paths, service templates, and paved road abstractions that make it easy for engineers to do the right thing by default. 

Who You Are

Minimum Qualifications

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and proficiency in Go, with a track record of shipping high-quality production services in cloud-native environments.
• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including significant time designing, building, and owning large-scale production software and distributed systems.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a closely related technical field required.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and proficiency in Go, with a track record of shipping high-quality production services in cloud-native environments.
• Proven ability to define multi-year technical strategy and execute across complex, cross-team domains.
• Deep systems design expertise with strong opinions on API design, service architecture, data models, software abstractions, correctness, scalability, and long-term maintainability.
• Deep experience debugging complex production issues and reasoning through distributed system behavior, performance bottlenecks, and failure modes.
• Strong experience designing developer-facing software such as internal platforms, APIs, CLIs, SDKs, workflow engines, or other tooling that engineers rely on every day.
• Deep understanding of Kubernetes and modern software delivery environments, with the ability to make sound architectural decisions in cloud-native systems.
• Demonstrated ability to influence technical decisions at the organizational level and communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• A track record of mentoring senior engineers and raising technical quality across teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep expertise in one or more DevEx domains such as build systems, test infrastructure, CI/CD, remote execution, caching, artifact systems, or developer environments.
• Hands-on experience designing and operating large-scale distributed services that support high-throughput engineering workflows.
• Experience building internal developer products with a strong focus on usability, API ergonomics, adoption, and long-term maintainability.
• Experience with AI-native developer tooling, including LLM-integrated workflows, agentic frameworks, MCP-style tooling, or autonomous developer agents with strong safety and governance patterns.
• Prior experience serving as a technical lead or system architect on a software platform with broad organizational impact.
• Kubernetes operator development, CRD design, or control-plane work — especially in the context of managing developer workloads or CI/CD infrastructure on Kubernetes.
• Prior experience at a cloud infrastructure company, hyperscaler, or HPC environment where engineering scale and compute heterogeneity create unique DevEx challenges.
• Familiarity with container runtimes, OCI image standards, or artifact distribution systems at scale.

What Success Looks Like

• Engineering teams move faster because the software systems behind build, test, and delivery are simpler, more reliable, and more scalable.
• The organization has clearer technical standards and better software abstractions for how developer-facing systems are designed and evolved.
• Developer Experience investments translate into measurable improvements in engineering productivity, software quality, and operational excellence.
• CoreWeave continues to build a world-class engineering organization by solving developer productivity problems with strong software engineering discipline and long-term technical vision.

The base salary range for this role is $227,000 to $303,000. 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).