Engineering Manager, SDN Control Plane

Crusoe•Sunnyvale, CA

4d•$215,000 - $260,000

About The Position

Crusoe is seeking an Engineering Manager, SDN Control Plane to lead the team building the scalable control plane for VPC networking, the Crusoe Cloud frontend network. In this hands-on leadership role, you will own the services on the network control plane that program multi-tenant virtual networks across large-scale GPU fleets. Unlike generic networking manager roles, this position focuses on delivering control-plane scale and reliability on aggressive timelines, often moving features from commit to production within days.

Requirements

At least 6-8+ years in distributed systems or cloud networking engineering, with 2-4+ years specifically managing engineering talent.
Strong knowledge of SDN and network virtualization: overlay networking (VXLAN/Geneve), VPC constructs, routing (BGP/EVPN), and control-plane architectures such as OVN/OVS or equivalent.
Hands-on experience building large-scale control planes: state reconciliation, consensus and consistency trade-offs, API design, and fleet-wide configuration propagation (Go, Kubernetes-style controllers, or similar).
A strong understanding of operating multi-tenant cloud services: SLOs, convergence-time and scale benchmarking, graceful degradation, and blast-radius containment.
The ability to resolve complex technical challenges in a fast-moving, execution-heavy environment.

Nice To Haves

Experience with DPU/SmartNIC-programmed dataplanes, cloud load balancing or NAT at scale, network security policy engines, or open-source contributions to OVN/OVS or SDN projects.

Responsibilities

Define the roadmap for the VPC control plane and drive the evolution of network virtualization systems (such as OVN/OVS) that deliver VPCs, subnets, security groups, load balancing, NAT, and internet/hybrid connectivity.
Contribute to the design of distributed control-plane services: intent APIs, state reconciliation, network policy compilation, and southbound programming of hosts and DPUs, while driving scalability well beyond current fleet size.
Support reliability engineering, convergence and API-latency benchmarking, regression prevention, and incident response, ensuring operational excellence within 3-6 month execution cycles.
Mentor and grow a team of mid-level to senior distributed systems engineers, setting technical standards and fostering a high-performance culture of accountability.
Partner closely with data-plane teams (XDP/eBPF, DPDK, DPU offload) and cloud product teams to deliver low-latency, highly available networking for multi-tenant GPU clusters.