Principal Production Engineer
About The Position
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 our first 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. The systems you'll be responsible for are the reason that compute translates into usable cloud, and at the growth rate Crusoe is operating, the scope of this role expands with every quarter. This is a high-ownership, high-autonomy position where you will set technical direction, drive observability and reliability standards across the organization, and be the kind of engineer that makes the people around them meaningfully better. The problems are novel, the scale is real, and the impact is immediate.
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
Nice To Haves
- 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
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
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
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
Education Level
No Education Listed
Number of Employees
251-500 employees
