Director, Engineering

Crusoe•Sunnyvale, CA

4d•$325,000 - $370,000

About The Position

Crusoe is seeking a seasoned engineering leader to own and scale the GPU and data center infrastructure powering its neocloud platform. This hands-on senior leadership position spans software and hardware, including validation platforms, lifecycle automation, orchestration services, firmware qualification, hardware security, deployments, and data center operations. The fleet is growing roughly 10x year over year and operates under a 99.5% monthly availability SLA, making reliability and automation directly tied to revenue. The Director will set the technical charter for fleet reliability and operational excellence, define availability metrics, and replace manual processes with automation. The role partners closely with Engineering, Product, Finance, Procurement, Hardware, Supply Chain, and executive leadership. The ideal candidate scales through systems, reasons from first principles, and leads hands-on by investigating root causes. The position owns fleet operations and deployments across co-location and owned facilities; firmware lifecycle and qualification; a consolidated validation platform; data center infrastructure engineering; hardware security and attestation; reliability and incident operations; and fleet procurement, capital expenditure, operating budgets, and reporting. It also builds and develops a high-performing team and translates engineering goals into business outcomes and SLOs across compute, storage, networking, and inference. Compensation is listed as up to $325,000–$370,000 plus bonus. Restricted Stock Units are included in all offers. Compensation depends on the applicant’s knowledge, education, abilities, internal equity, and market data.

Requirements

18+ years of experience in infrastructure, data center operations, or fleet management, including 6+ years in a senior leadership role.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Deep hands-on expertise with GPU infrastructure, including NVIDIA or AMD accelerator platforms.
A blend of software and hardware leadership, with credibility in platform/automation software such as workflow engines, orchestration, and validation pipelines, as well as physical-layer data center operations.
Experience operating or scaling data center infrastructure in a high-growth environment such as a neocloud, hyperscaler, or large enterprise.
Strong command of data center fundamentals: power distribution, cooling systems, networking fabrics, and physical security.
Proven ability to manage vendor relationships and negotiate large-scale infrastructure contracts of $50M+ and own large CapEx budgets in partnership with Finance and Procurement.
Excellent communication skills, including the ability to explain complex infrastructure topics to executive and non-technical audiences.

Nice To Haves

Prior experience at a neocloud or AI infrastructure company, and familiarity with GPU failure modes and auto-remediation techniques.
Hands-on experience with firmware qualification, BMC/OpenBMC development, or hardware attestation such as TPM, secure boot, or remote attestation.
Familiarity with InfiniBand, RoCE, or other high-performance networking fabrics at scale.
Experience building validation/burn-in platforms and multi-node performance benchmarking, such as MFU or collective communication tests.
Exposure to DCIM, asset management/RFID, lifecycle automation, or fleet orchestration tools such as NetBox and Temporal.
Background in sustainability initiatives such as renewable energy procurement.

Responsibilities

Lead day-to-day fleet operations and greenfield deployments across co-location and owned facilities, from rack landing to customer availability; own fleet-health metrics and work toward a 30-day time-to-sellable target.
Build a pipeline to qualify and track firmware releases across 10+ SKUs and multiple OEMs/ODMs; reduce qualification backlog, hold partners accountable, and evaluate in-house BMC development such as OpenBMC.
Consolidate hardware automation pipelines and validation scripts into a platform built on a workflow engine; own bare-metal and multi-node burn-in and stress testing, define pass/fail criteria, deliver performance baselines such as MFU at cluster handover, and require stack-validation results for production-change approval.
Own data center infrastructure engineering, including power, cooling, networking fabrics, and physical security; prioritize RMAs before warranty expiry, reduce manual node recoveries through lifecycle automation, and make automation the source of truth for site deployments.
Lead asset-visibility initiatives such as fleet-wide RFID and advanced DCIM tooling.
Own trusted, tamper-evident hardware strategy and lead firmware and OS integrity attestation, including TPM-based identity, secure-boot gating, and remote attestation that can quarantine compromised hardware without affecting customer workloads.
Define operational KPIs, including uptime, PUE, MTTR, MTTD, and MTBF, and establish runbooks, a tiered on-call model, and single-owner incident closure.
Partner with Procurement, Hardware, and Supply Chain on GPU and hardware sourcing, pricing, supply commitments, and SLAs.
Work with the Hardware leader on fleet capital and operating budgets, and report fleet health, spend, and forecasts to executive leadership.
Build, develop, and retain a high-performing team of fleet engineers, data center infrastructure professionals, and platform/automation software engineers.
Translate engineering targets into business outcomes and define SLOs with Product across compute, storage, networking, and inference.