Senior Manager, Data Center Operations

Crusoe • Houston, TX

2d • $160,000 - $195,000 • Onsite

About The Position

As the Senior Manager of Data Center Operations for our Houston site, you will be the tactical lead for both our high-performance production and AI lab environments. This is a hands-on leadership role focused on the "white space"; specifically hardware lifecycle management, break-fix operations, and lab scalability. While you will coordinate with the facility landlord regarding security, site safety, power, and cooling; your primary role is ensuring our AI hardware is racked, stacked, and running at peak performance.

Requirements

• Proven Leadership: 7+ years in data center operations, with specific experience managing white space or lab environments.
• Hardware Expertise: Deep, hands-on experience with enterprise-grade server architecture (GPU-heavy clusters are a significant plus).
• The "Tenant" Mindset: Experience operating in a colocation or leased-space environment; you know how to manage a landlord to get what your team needs.
• Tactical Execution: You are as comfortable in providing updates to senior leadership as you are on the floor with a crash cart and a label maker.
• Communication: Ability to translate hardware health and lab constraints into clear updates for cross-functional stakeholders.
• Safety & Compliance: Knowledge of rack-level safety and compliance standards (ISO, OSHA).
• Reliability: Willingness to be hands-on and available to support the production and lab environments during critical hardware failures or deployment pushes.

Responsibilities

• Hardware Lifecycle & Break-Fix: Lead the day-to-day maintenance of our AI-optimized hardware. Oversee rapid diagnostics, component replacement (GPU trays, DIMM’s, and hard drives), and RMA processes.
• Lab to Production: Drive the physical installation and cabling of new lab servers, storage, and network devices. Develop documentation that can be used by data center operations technicians at other locations as hardware transitions from the lab into production.
• Landlord & Vendor Relations: Act as the primary on-site liaison with the facility landlord. Monitor their delivery of critical utilities (power/cooling) and hold them accountable to SLAs within our leased space.
• Team Leadership: Build and mentor a lean, high-performing team of hardware technicians. Foster a culture of precision, especially regarding hardware repair management and asset tracking.
• Operational Excellence: Maintain a "gold standard" white space environment. Develop and refine SOPs for hardware deployments, firmware updates, and physical security audits.
• Inventory & Logistics: Manage on-site spare parts inventory and coordinate high-value logistics (shipping/receiving) of specialized AI compute nodes.
• Smart Hands Support: Provide "eyes and ears" for remote engineering teams, executing complex physical interventions to minimize downtime.

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/month

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed