Senior Staff Engineer, Platform R&D

Crusoe•San Francisco, CA

1d•$245,000 - $295,000

About The Position

We are seeking a Sr. Staff Engineer, Platform R&D to embed senior research and development capacity directly into Crusoe's Managed Platform Services (MAPS) team. In this role, you will accelerate delivery across all MAPS domains through rapid experimentation, AI-augmented prototyping, and hands-on product scoping — reducing ambiguity early and ensuring engineering and product are always building toward the right incremental milestones. You will float across teams and domains, operating as a force multiplier with no single product ownership.

Requirements

Proven ability to rapidly build high-fidelity prototypes across a range of technologies — comfortable moving fast, exploring multiple approaches in parallel, and knowing when good enough is the right call.
Demonstrated experience using AI tools to accelerate software development, research, and technical decision-making.
Strong understanding of managed cloud services, distributed systems, and platform engineering patterns. Able to recognize how new ideas map to or diverge from existing infrastructure.
Ability to engage early in ambiguous product spaces, ask the right questions, and translate fuzzy requirements into scoped, buildable increments.
Exceptional ability to synthesize and communicate complex technical tradeoffs to both engineering and product audiences. Comfortable presenting findings, recommendations, and prototypes to senior stakeholders.
Able to operate without formal authority — earning trust across teams through technical credibility, clear thinking, and consistent delivery.
10+ years of software development experience, including significant time in senior individual contributor or staff-level roles.
Experience with modern compiled or systems languages (Go, Rust, Java, C++) and cloud-native infrastructure.

Responsibilities

Lead fast-cycle R&D efforts across MAPS domains — using AI-augmented workflows to prototype not just the recommended solution, but the full solution space.
Compress the time from idea to working proof-of-concept so teams can make better decisions faster.
Partner with engineering and product to evaluate the viability of new platform capabilities.
Identify where net-new products overlap with or can extend existing platform services, reducing duplication and accelerating time-to-value.
Float across all MAPS teams and domains as an embedded R&D resource.
Provide senior technical guidance on architecture, implementation approach, and build-vs-extend tradeoffs without being constrained to a single product area.
Own the early, fuzzy stages of product and feature work — defining scope, surfacing risk, and producing concrete artifacts (prototypes, technical specs, feasibility assessments) that make downstream engineering and product work faster and more precise.
Continuously identify commonalities across domains and surface opportunities to consolidate, reuse, or generalize platform capabilities — keeping the MAPS portfolio coherent as it grows.