Director of Engineering, Flex Compute

Crusoe•Sunnyvale, CA

23h•$285,000 - $335,000

About The Position

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: Power, not silicon, is the binding constraint on AI infrastructure. Crusoe is vertically integrated from electrons to tokens; generation, batteries, controls, and the cloud orchestration layer which means we can credibly commit flexible load to utilities and deliver on it. No other AI cloud can. Flexible Compute is the system that makes that real: reducing data-center power draw on demand quickly, reliably, verifiably — while protecting the workloads that matter most. It gets us megawatts sooner, earns more per megawatt, and rides through grid-stress events without breaking SLAs. You'll operate at the seam between one of the industry's fastest-growing energy footprints and the software that controls it. This is a utility-facing, safety-critical control system, and a ground-up build. You’ll define the architecture, ship the first production system, and build the team from scratch.

Requirements

12+ years in software engineering, including 5+ leading engineering teams, ideally taking a system from 0→1 to production scale
Deep experience with distributed control planes, orchestration, or fleet automation (e.g., Temporal, Kubernetes, Slurm)
A track record with safety-critical or physically-actuating systems, where a misfire has a bounded, designed-for worst case
Working knowledge of data-center power systems: utility interconnection, switchgear/UPS/BESS, rack/PDU distribution, power telemetry, and GPU power management
Experience with energy markets or grid programs demand response, curtailable-load tariffs, ISO/RTO market signals (e.g., ERCOT, PJM, CAISO) or demonstrated speed to fluency in them
Strong build-vs-buy judgment and comfort deciding with incomplete data
A record of hiring senior engineers and running healthy operations for systems that must never fail silently

Nice To Haves

GPU cluster operations or AI cloud infrastructure experience
Prior work in the energy sector: power generation, storage, utility software, or grid-scale controls
Background in GPU power/performance modeling, DVFS, or turning research prototypes into production systems
Experience with checkpoint/preemption for large training jobs or power-aware scheduling

Responsibilities

Own the curtailment orchestration and decision layer: grid-signal ingestion, staged shedding, per-SKU power capping without ever silently dropping a paid workload
Land a utility-validated pilot: fast ramp to setpoint, tight accuracy, high-fidelity telemetry, and the test harness that proves it before we commit to a utility
Deliver dynamic power management for oversubscription — more GPUs per megawatt with no customer-visible impact
Build fast, workload-aware GPU power estimation, validated against fleet telemetry : the engine behind shed forecasting, oversubscription admission, and power planning for new silicon
Design for safety: authenticated signal ingress, bounded blast radius, fail-safe defaults, manual backstops
Own graceful ride-through of power-loss and grid-stress events, integrated with on-site battery and generation backstops
Partner deeply with Data Center Engineering (mechanical, electrical, controls) and Energy teams on interconnection commitments, curtailment program design, and BESS/generation integration.
Integrate with our cloud control plane across Kubernetes and Slurm fleets : one control plane, not two
Make build-vs-leverage calls across vendor power-management stacks and grid integration layers
Hire and lead the team from the ground up, keeping headcount sublinear to fleet growth through automation