Staff Software Engineer, Cluster Orch (Non SUNK)

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 . We're proud to be a Living Wage accredited Employer. What You'll Do: CoreWeave’s AI Workload Orchestration Platform team builds and operates the core, Kubernetes-native substrate that governs how massive AI workloads are admitted, scheduled, and executed across our global GPU footprint. Serving as a strategic complement to SUNK (Slurm on Kubernetes), this platform underpins both training and inference pipelines across the CoreWeave cloud, ensuring highly efficient resource utilization for the world's most demanding AI applications. About the Role: As a Staff Software Engineer, you will act as a principal technical leader driving CoreWeave’s Kubernetes-native orchestration strategy. You will own the technical vision and architecture for major portions of the platform, defining how AI workloads are admitted, scheduled, and governed across large GPU clusters using frameworks such as Kueue, Volcano, and Ray. This high-impact role requires strong systems thinking to resolve systemic performance, scalability, and fairness issues at scale. You will lead cross-team architecture reviews, drive technical alignment across broader infrastructure, CKS, and managed inference teams, and establish platform-wide standards for reliability, capacity management, and developer experience while mentoring senior engineers within the organization. Who You Are: Minimum 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with deep technical expertise in distributed systems or cloud platforms. Strong software development proficiency in Go with a proven track record of designing large-scale, long-lived production systems. Deep technical knowledge of Kubernetes internals, scheduling mechanisms, custom resource definitions (CRDs), and controller-based architectures. Demonstrated engineering experience designing, scaling, or evolving orchestration, scheduling, or hardware resource-management platforms. Proven ability to lead high-impact technical initiatives across multiple distributed engineering teams without direct authority. Strong operational mindset with a history of owning and stabilizing mission-critical production systems at scale. Preferred Qualifications: Hands-on experience with modern Kubernetes-native orchestration frameworks such as Kueue, Volcano, Ray, or similar batch/streaming schedulers. Deep structural background in AI infrastructure, ML platforms, HPC, or large-scale multi-tenant batch systems. Solid understanding of advanced scheduling concepts, including fair-share algorithms, pre-emption, quota management, and multi-tenant resource isolation. Experience defining and operating SLOs, building capacity models, and driving large-scale infrastructure reliability improvements. Active upstream code contributions to open-source infrastructure or orchestration projects. Wondering If You're a Good Fit? We believe in investing in our people, and value candidates who can bring their own diversified experiences to our teams even if you aren't a 100% skill or experience match. Here are a few qualities we've found compatible with our team. If some of this describes you, we'd love to talk. You love to scale highly complex distributed orchestration layers and establish technical visions that redefine how massive clusters operate. You're curious about optimizing advanced scheduling primitives, pre-emption strategies, and maximizing GPU efficiencies across thousands of nodes. You're an expert in driving cross-team technical…