Principal Production Engineer
About the role
Crusoe is building the AI factory which is a vertically integrated company spanning power generation, purpose-built data centers, and the cloud platform that frontier AI runs on. We are looking for a Principal Engineer on our Production Engineering team. Someone who will own the reliability, scalability, and operational excellence of the cloud infrastructure that sits on top of it all: compute, storage, networking, and the platform and tooling that ties it together.
Responsibilities
- Own the reliability and scalability of Crusoe's cloud infrastructure — compute, storage, and networking — defining SLOs, leading incident response, and driving systemic improvements that reduce toil and raise the bar across the platform
- Build and mature the observability and tooling layer — from network fabric telemetry and storage health to control plane instrumentation and on-call tooling — so the team can detect, diagnose, and resolve issues faster than customers notice them
- Drive platform reliability improvements across the full cloud stack, partnering closely with software, hardware, and network engineering teams to influence architecture decisions early, before they become operational debt
- Act as a trusted advisor to senior leadership, bringing perspective on observability trends and advocating for the right long-term technology investments
- Set the technical standards for how Crusoe's production engineering organization builds, operates, and scales — defining on-call culture, incident frameworks, and reliability practices that grow with the company
- Mentor senior and staff engineers, elevate the team's collective technical depth, and be the person others seek out when the problem is genuinely hard
Requirements
15+ years of experience in infrastructure, networking, or production engineering — with meaningful time at companies operating at internet scale (cloud providers, CDNs, large-scale social/media platforms, or similar)
Strong systems fundamentals: Linux, distributed systems, storage, compute scheduling — you understand the full stack from hardware up
Hands-on data center experience: you've done physical infra, understand power and thermal constraints, and can reason about reliability at the facility level, not just the server level
The ability to write code — not necessarily full-time, but enough to automate what shouldn't be manual, instrument what isn't observable, and build tooling your team will actually use
Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills, including the ability to synthesize ambiguous customer and system signals into clear problem statements and designs. Strong incident command: you lead calmly under pressure, communicate clearly during outages, and run blameless retrospectives that actually improve systems
Deep networking expertise: BGP, OSPF, ECMP, load balancing, and low-latency network design in production — you can debug a routing issue and design a fabric, sometimes in the same incident
Experience with HPC infrastructure: GPU cluster operations, job schedulers (Slurm, Kubernetes), high-bandwidth interconnects (InfiniBand, RoCE)
Prior principal or staff IC role where you influenced org-level technical strategy, not just project-level execution
Exposure to sustainability-focused or energy-constrained compute environments
Qualifications
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 benefit; $300 per month
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 benefit; $300 per month
Pay
Compensation will be paid in the range of $261,000 - $326,000 + Bonus. 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.
Schedule
N/A