Chief of Staff

Crusoe•San Francisco, CA

1d•$246,000 - $300,000

About The Position

Crusoe’s Cloud Engineering organization is 260 people today and hiring toward 400. At that scale, the things that hold an engineering org together—operational visibility, cross-team coordination, consistent planning rhythms, clear communication—don’t happen by accident anymore. This role exists to make sure they happen on purpose. You’ll be the operational leader and public face of the engineering organization. That means owning the engineering operating cadence—service health reviews, quarterly planning, initiative tracking—but it also means being the person who coordinates the hundred things that just need to get done across teams: driving alignment with product, making sure cross-cutting programs don’t stall, representing engineering in forums where someone credible needs to show up, and helping engineering leaders at every level execute more effectively. This is not a traditional chief of staff role focused on calendars and slide decks, and it’s not a TPM role scoped to a single program. You’ll work across the entire engineering organization, partnering with directors and tech leads on everything from incident follow-up accountability to headcount planning to making sure the RFC process actually works. You report to the Head of Cloud Engineering and sit on the executive team. The ideal candidate has a technical background—software engineering, TPM, or product in an infrastructure context—and the organizational instincts to operate at the seams between teams. You’re someone who can read an incident postmortem and spot the missing follow-up, but also someone who can walk into a room of directors with competing priorities and drive them to a decision.

Requirements

8+ years in software engineering, technical program management, or a technical product role. You’ve been close enough to production systems to understand what an SLO breach actually means.
You’ve operated in a high-growth infrastructure or cloud environment where things break and processes are still being built. Ambiguity doesn’t paralyze you—it’s where you do your best work.
You’ve helped scale an engineering organization through a significant growth phase and understand what breaks at 200, 300, and 500 people. You know which processes to formalize and which to leave lightweight.
You have strong opinions about operational excellence and you’re not afraid to push back on engineering leaders when follow-through is slipping. Diplomacy matters, but so does directness.
You’re a natural coordinator who can work across teams without formal authority. Directors and tech leads trust you because you come prepared, you follow up, and you make their lives easier.
You can take messy, inconsistent data from multiple sources and turn it into a clear picture of organizational health. Dashboards, reports, metrics—you know how to make data tell the truth.
You’re a strong communicator who can represent engineering credibly to product, executive leadership, and external stakeholders. You’re comfortable being the person in the room when engineering needs a voice.
You’re scrappy. When the automation doesn’t exist yet, you build it or you do it manually until it does. You don’t wait for perfect systems to start driving accountability.
Low ego, high drive. You care about the outcome more than the credit.

Nice To Haves

Time inside AWS, GCP, Azure, CoreWeave, Lambda Labs, or a similar cloud provider will help you ramp faster on the operational landscape.
Experience standing up or running an engineering operations function, chief of staff function, or reliability program from scratch.
You’ve driven quarterly or annual planning processes for engineering orgs of 200+ people.
Familiarity with incident.io, Opsgenie, PagerDuty, or similar incident management platforms at scale.
You’ve built reporting automation—pulling data from APIs, generating dashboards, automating the tedious parts of operational reporting.
Background in AI/ML infrastructure gives you useful context for the workloads our platform supports.

Responsibilities

Be the connective tissue across engineering leadership. Build real relationships with directors and tech leads, know what's actually going on in their orgs, and help them see the things they're too close to notice.
Build and own the KPI infrastructure that gives leadership real visibility — SLO dashboards, incident follow-up completion rates, on-call burden, deployment velocity, initiative trackers. Data should tell the story before anyone has to ask.
Drive quarterly planning for engineering alongside product and TPM. Own the process, the timeline, and the quality of the output — every team walks out with clear goals and commitments, full stop.
Work across the engineering organization to ensure the org stays close. Identify redundant processes and gaps, and suggest ways to close and collapse them.
Push back on engineering leaders with technical credibility. Go deep on the topics that matter, don't accept surface-level answers, and hold people to the commitments they made last week.
Be the face of engineering in cross-functional forums; product, customer success, exec leadership. Represent priorities and constraints clearly so individual teams aren't getting pulled in ten directions by people who aren't in the room.
Stay tight with product leadership between planning cycles. You're the reason engineering and product don't drift apart and then scramble to realign every quarter.
Own the cross-cutting programs that don't have a natural single owner - production readiness, on-call process, engineering-wide tooling decisions, org-wide comms. If nobody owns it, you do.
Coordinate headcount planning, org design conversations, and the operational logistics of scaling from 260 to 400+ engineers across multiple sites and countries.
Use AI tooling and agentic systems aggressively to aggregate information across a large, globally distributed org. Build systems and workflows that scale.
Drive follow-through on commitments across the org. You're the person who remembers what was promised and isn't afraid to ask about it.
Partner with tooling teams to tighten the connective tissue between Opsgenie, Jira, Slack, and incident.io - operational data should flow cleanly into reporting and decisions without manual stitching.