Job Details

Senior/Staff Cloud Hypervisor R&D

At Crusoe, we are building the "engine room" of the AI revolution. We are seeking a Staff Cloud Hypervisor R&D Engineer to serve as the lead architect for our next-generation virtualization stack. In this role, you will move beyond standard virtualization to design a "Greenfield" hypervisor environment where GPUs, DPUs, and high-speed interconnects are first-class citizens. You will be responsible for eliminating the "virtualization tax," ensuring our cloud infrastructure delivers bare-metal performance for the world's most demanding AI/ML workloads.

Location: San Francisco, CA; Sunnyvale, CA (Onsite)

What You'll Be Working On:

• Next-Gen Hypervisor Architecture: Lead the R&D and implementation of core hypervisor components (KVM, QEMU, or custom Rust-based solutions) specifically optimized for massive-scale GPU fleets.
• AI Hardware Virtualization: Develop and refine advanced hardware pass-through and abstraction techniques (SR-IOV, VFIO, mdev) to ensure NVIDIA GPUs and BlueField DPUs operate with near-zero latency in a multi-tenant environment.
• The "Holy Grail" Challenges: Solve high-stakes technical hurdles such as live migration for AI workloads with 80GB+ VRAM and optimizing PCIe peer-to-peer communication between virtualized accelerators.
• Performance Research & Profiling: Conduct deep-dive bottleneck analysis across the entire stackfrom CPU microarchitecture and MMU virtualization to guest OS schedulingto minimize jitter and maximize throughput.
• Open Source Leadership: Actively contribute to and maintain upstream open-source virtualization projects, positioning Crusoe as a thought leader in the Linux kernel and virtualization communities.
• Security & Isolation: Architect robust security boundaries for AI-native cloud infrastructure, balancing high-performance hardware access with strict multi-tenant isolation and hardening.

What You'll Bring to the Team:

• 7+ Years of Experience: Proven track record in hypervisor internals, kernel development, or low-level systems programming.
• Deep Virtualization Expertise: Expert-level knowledge of CPU virtualization (Intel VT-x, AMD-V) and memory virtualization (EPT/NPT, HugePages). You should be comfortable discussing the nuances of VMExit overhead.
• Hardware-Software Integration: Experience working with specialized AI hardware, including GPUs, InfiniBand/RoCE NICs, and SmartNICs/DPUs.
• Programming & Tooling: Mastery of C and C++ is required; proficiency in Rust for modern systems programming is highly preferred. Experience with QEMU, KVM, and Linux kernel debugging tools (perf, ftrace, eBPF).
• I/O Mastery: Deep understanding of VirtIO, vhost-user, and hardware-accelerated I/O paths.
• Technical Leadership: Experience leading complex, cross-functional projects that bridge the gap between hardware engineering and cloud control planes.

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 FSA benefit of $300 per month

Compensation: Compensation will be paid in the range of $204,000 - $247,000. Restricted Stock Units are included in all offers. Compensation to be determined by the applicant's education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity and alignment with market data.

Crusoe 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.