Senior Engineering Manager, SDN Control Plane

Crusoe•Sunnyvale, CA

4d•$250,000 - $300,000

About The Position

Crusoe is seeking a Senior 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 senior leadership role, you will own the architecture, implementation, and production operation of the distributed systems 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 10+ years in distributed systems or cloud networking engineering, with 5-7+ years specifically managing senior/staff-level talent.
Deep 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 lead the evolution of network virtualization systems (such as OVN/OVS) that deliver VPCs, subnets, security groups, load balancing, NAT, and internet/hybrid connectivity.
Oversee 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.
Lead 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 senior and staff-level 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.