--- title: 'Senior Staff Applications Engineer - Spark at Crusoe' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-staff-applications-engineer-spark-crusoe-denver-deckr9nf07zp' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-11-06' --- # Senior Staff Applications Engineer - Spark at Crusoe - **Company:** [Crusoe](https://feeny.ai/companies/crusoe) - **Location:** Denver, CO / United States - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-10-02 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-06 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/crusoe/e9374a42-aefd-451e-8a41-583083060c79 ## Job 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. We'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. We'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. If 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. About the Role: We are seeking a Senior Staff Applications Engineer to own how Spark answers the question of technical fit. You will build and maintain the evaluation framework that determines whether a site, partnership, or commercial opportunity is viable for the Spark modular data center (MDC) and Spark-Liquid (DLC) product lines, and you will support the Energy Development Group (EDG), business development, and partner teams as they apply it. When an opportunity is undefined, unconventional, or contested, you are the Spark team's point of contact, the person who answers the hard product questions and delivers the technical verdict. Spark is on a path to deploy hundreds of megawatts of modular capacity, and every megawatt of it begins as an unqualified site on a map. Your judgment about where this product can be applied, not the design of the product itself, is what converts that pipeline into deployable capacity. What You'll Be Working On: Product Authority & Opportunity Qualification - Qualification Framework: Build and maintain the standardized screening criteria, scoring model, decision thresholds, and report format that define what makes a site or opportunity viable for Spark deployments. Keep it current as the product roadmap evolves, and keep a record of past calls and their rationale. - Team Enablement: Equip EDG, business development, and partner teams to apply the framework themselves on standard opportunities. Train, document, and iterate so routine qualification does not depend on a single point of failure, you. - Escalated Technical Judgment: Serve as the Spark team's point of contact for opportunities the framework cannot resolve, including undefined sites, non-standard configurations, and contested calls. Deliver a clear fit, conditional fit, or no-fit verdict with the engineering rationale behind it. - Speed Discipline: Turn around escalated feasibility assessments in days, not weeks. Frame the problem tightly enough that deeper analysis, when required, lands on the respective engineering discipline ready to be worked. - Deviation & Exception Management: Identify where an opportunity requires deviation from the standard Spark configuration, quantify the engineering cost and schedule impact, and route it to the responsible engineering discipline for disposition. - New Application Assessment: Evaluate technical fit for non-standard applications such as edge deployments, distributed energy assets, co-located industrial sites, and third-party colocation and shell-rent arrangements, and define what the product would need to change to serve them. - Roadmap Feedback Loop: Feed recurring field constraints back to Spark design engineering and R&D as prioritized product requirements. You are the closed loop between what the market presents and what the product can absorb. Site & Partner Engagement - EDG Partnership: Serve as Spark's dedicated technical counterpart to the Energy Development Group across the full site pipeline, from initial screen through definitive agreement. - Spark Fit Assessment: Evaluate candidate sites and opportunities against Spark module requirements, covering power, thermal, civil, and physical interface, and define what the site must deliver at the module boundary. - Field Validation: Conduct site walks alongside EDG, developers, and utility counterparties, converting observations into Spark product requirements and a maintained risk register. Technical Communication & Diligence - Diligence Support: Provide the technical inputs that Finance requires to model an opportunity, including module configuration, power and cooling assumptions, and site-specific efficiency and derate factors. - Executive Communication: Translate multi-discipline engineering tradeoffs into clear go/no-go decision frameworks for commercial and executive stakeholders. What You'll Bring to the Team: - Professional Experience: 10+ years of progressive engineering experience spanning data center infrastructure, power generation or utility interconnection, industrial capital projects, or modular and containerized systems. - Broad Engineering Fluency: Working fluency across data center infrastructure disciplines including electrical (MV/LV distribution, switchgear, transformers), mechanical/thermal (DLC, CDUs, heat rejection), and civil/structural (foundations, seismic/wind loading, rigging). - First-Principles Decision Making: Track record of making feasibility calls from first principles under incomplete information, with direct accountability for recommendations carrying real capital consequences. - Technical Counterparty Credibility: Proven ability to hold technical credibility with external developers, utilities, enterprise customers, and executives while keeping opportunities moving rapidly. - Unit Economics Command: Ability to connect engineering decisions directly to $/MW, capex, PUE, and deployment schedules. - Product Authority Track Record: Demonstrated depth on a specific engineered product or platform, where you were the person others relied on for an authoritative answer on capabilities and limits. - Mountaineer Spirit: Relentless technical rigor, comfort with ambiguity, a safety-first culture, the judgment to say no early, and the discipline to make calls when perfect information is unavailable. - Education: Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a closely related engineering discipline. Bonus Points - Experience with modular, containerized, or prefabricated infrastructure product lines. - Familiarity with agency certification and AHJ coordination for modular electrical equipment across varied jurisdictions. - Deep familiarity with energy development, interconnection processes/queues, and behind-the-meter site configurations. This Role Is Not a Good Fit If: - You prefer purely theoretical design work over applied, rapid feasibility assessments. - You require complete data and fully finalized engineering designs before making a technical recommendation. - You struggle to communicate complex engineering tradeoffs to commercial partners or executive stakeholders. Benefits: - Competitive compensation and equity packages - Restricted Stock Units - Paid time off, paid holidays & leave of absence programs - Comprehensive health, dental & vision insurance - Employer contributions to HSA account - Paid parental leave - Paid life insurance, short-term and long-term disability - Professional development & tuition reimbursement - Mental health & wellness support - Commuter benefits (parking & transit) - Cell phone stipend - 401(k) Retirement plan with company match up to 4% of salary - Volunteer time off - Global travel insurance & emergency assistance - Daily meals allowance - Additional perks & programs specific to location ## Compensation Range Compensation will be paid in the range of up to $190,000-$215,000 + 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. (#INDCORP) 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. ## About Crusoe ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Crusoe is an energy-first AI infrastructure company that designs, builds, and operates hyperscale data centers and a cloud platform purpose-built for artificial intelligence workloads. - **Entity Type**: Private (Series E) - **Headquarters**: Denver, Colorado, USA - **Founded**: 2018 - **Founders**: Chase Lochmiller and Cully Cavness ## Core Business - Primary industry/industries: AI Infrastructure, Cloud Computing, Data Centers, Clean Energy - Target customers: Enterprise AI companies, AI-native startups, research institutions, government agencies (B2B) - **Mission**: "Accelerate the abundance of energy and intelligence." ## Products & Services - **Crusoe Cloud**: An AI-optimized cloud platform purpose-built for AI workloads, featuring high-performance NVIDIA and AMD compute, accelerated storage, and optimized RDMA networking. Claims to deploy models up to 20x faster and cut costs by up to 81%. - **Crusoe Managed Inference**: A managed AI inference service built with Crusoe's proprietary MemoryAlloy technology, offering best-in-class speed, throughput, and reliability. Features the Crusoe Intelligence Foundry for model selection and API key management. - **AI Data Center Infrastructure**: Vertically integrated design, build, and operation of hyperscale AI factories (e.g., the 1.2 GW Stargate campus in Abilene, TX). Modular, scalable construction for power-hungry AI workloads. - **Crusoe Managed Kubernetes & Slurm**: Managed orchestration services that eliminate operational overhead for customers. - **Crusoe AutoClusters**: Fault-tolerant, managed cluster services for large-scale AI training. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed (private company). - **Key Metric**: Raised over $1.8B+ in total funding (Series E in 2024 was $1B+; Series D in 2024 was $600M; Series C in 2021 was $350M). - **Notable Investors/Partners**: NVIDIA, NYDIG, GE Vernova, Redwood Materials, Tallgrass, AMD. The company has also partnered with leading energy and technology firms to power its data centers. - **Growth Signals**: Divested bitcoin mining business to NYDIG in 2023 to focus exclusively on AI infrastructure; broke ground on the 1.2 GW Stargate campus in Abilene, TX; expanded into Europe with a geothermal/hydro-powered deployment in Iceland; announced 1.8 GW Wyoming data center with Tallgrass; acquired GPU memory optimization startup Atero and established a Tel Aviv office. ## Competitive Advantages - **Energy-First Approach**: The company’s core differentiator is its vertical integration starting from energy sourcing. It uses "environmentally aligned power sources" (wind, solar, hydropower, geothermal, natural gas with carbon capture) to power its AI factories, including pioneering technology to convert wasted natural gas into energy. - **Vertical Integration**: Controls the entire stack—from finding innovative energy sources to building and managing hyperscale data centers and operating the cloud platform. - **NVIDIA Partnership**: Close partnership with NVIDIA, providing access to the latest and highest-performance GPU hardware for its cloud and infrastructure. - **Proven Performance**: Claims 99.98% uptime, 100% customer satisfaction score, and significant cost/performance advantages (up to 81% cost reduction). ## Strategic Focus - **Massive Infrastructure Expansion**: Aggressively scaling its data center footprint, with major projects in Abilene, Texas (Stargate) and Wyoming (Tallgrass), and expansion into Europe. - **Deepening AI Cloud**: Continuing to build out its Crusoe Cloud platform with managed services (Kubernetes, Slurm, AutoClusters) to make it easier for AI companies to use their infrastructure. - **Responsible AI**: Emphasizing sustainability and responsible AI governance, as evidenced by achieving ISO 42001 certification and publishing an ESG report. - **Acquisition-led Growth**: Acquired Atero (GPU memory optimization) to enhance its core technology stack. ## Why Work Here - **Mission-Driven**: The company is united by a tangible mission: "Accelerate the abundance of energy and intelligence." Employees report high levels of engagement (92% proud to work there per internal survey). - **Massive Growth Trajectory**: Crusoe is at the center of the AI infrastructure boom, building some of the world's most powerful AI factories. For job seekers, this means exposure to cutting-edge technology and the opportunity to scale a company from a startup to an industry leader. - **Culture**: The company values "moving fast and making things," continuous learning, and collective genius. It describes itself as an "AI factory company" that values velocity and impact. - **Work Policy**: Hybrid/Office presence required in most roles. Office locations include: Denver (HQ), San Francisco, Sunnyvale, Bellevue, Tulsa, Dublin (Ireland), and Tel Aviv (Israel). - **Benefits**: Competitive compensation & equity, comprehensive health & wellness, mental health resources, retirement plans, paid time off, leave of absence programs, learning & development, volunteer time off, daily meals allowance, and other location-specific perks. - **Engineering Culture**: Strong emphasis on technical excellence, working with large-scale systems, and pioneering new approaches to energy and infrastructure. The company values candidates' "AI fluency" in its hiring process. ## Sources 1. [crusoe.ai](https://www.crusoe.ai/) 2. [crusoe.ai/careers](https://www.crusoe.ai/about/careers) 3. [crusoe.ai/about/culture](https://www.crusoe.ai/about/careers/culture) 4. 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