Staff Product Manager, Orchestration

Crusoe•Sunnyvale, CA

1d•$208,725 - $253,000

About The Position

As a Staff Product Manager for Orchestration, you will define the vision and own outcomes for the foundational layers of Crusoe's cloud. You will lead the orchestration services that allow both our internal teams and external customers to deploy massive-scale training, fine-tuning, and inference workloads on our carbon-reducing, vertically integrated AI cloud. This role requires deep functional expertise and the ability to drive complex, cross-functional product initiatives with minimal direction. You will own the product lifecycle end-to-end—from identifying ambiguous, ill-defined problems to building alignment across engineering, SRE, and business stakeholders—and translate that into a roadmap that directly contributes to Crusoe's revenue and competitive differentiation. You will oversee our Managed Kubernetes offerings and the underlying infrastructure clusters that power our entire service ecosystem, serving as the connective tissue between the hardware layer and the user-facing software experience.

Requirements

Technical Fluency: Deep, hands-on experience with Kubernetes or comparable orchestration systems, with a strong understanding of cloud infrastructure, virtualization, and the hardware-software interface. You can engage credibly at the "metal" layer.
Product Experience: 7+ years of technical product management or product-minded engineering experience, with a track record of owning complex, ambiguous product areas independently and delivering measurable business impact.
First-Principles Thinking: You reject "industry standards" in favor of logic-based frameworks. You understand the "physics" of infrastructure—such as why idle GPUs cost nearly as much as busy ones—and use that understanding to unlock differentiated product decisions.
High Agency: You don't wait for permission or a fully defined problem statement. You identify gaps in the orchestration layer, form a point of view, and drive toward resolution—bringing others along with you.
Cross-Functional Influence: You have a proven ability to build consensus with engineering leads and senior managers, align multiple teams around a product direction, and develop the product instincts of colleagues around you.
Collaborative Backbone: You balance deep stakeholder empathy with the conviction to say "no" to features that don't align with long-term strategic reality—and you can articulate why clearly.

Nice To Haves

AI/ML Familiarity: You understand how training and inference workloads interact with container orchestration systems.
HPC Expertise: Experience with high-performance computing workloads and specialized schedulers (e.g., Slurm, volcano).
Active AI Tinkerer: You run your own local LLMs, experiment with agents, or otherwise participate in the AI revolution firsthand.

Responsibilities

Orchestration Vision & Roadmap: Define and own the multi-team roadmap for our foundational orchestration services. Identify opportunities in ambiguous problem spaces, set long-term strategic direction, and build consensus across engineering leads and senior stakeholders.
Foundational Infrastructure: Drive requirements for the orchestration layers hosting Crusoe's mission-critical services, balancing reliability, scale, and long-term platform implications—including second- and third-order effects of key architectural decisions.
Customer Empathy & Feedback: Engage regularly with current and prospective customers to surface unmet needs, synthesize feedback across the portfolio, and translate insights into concrete product investments with clear ROI.
Technical Prioritization: Lead ruthless prioritization and navigate complex trade-offs (e.g., latency vs. cost, speed vs. reliability) across multiple workstreams in close collaboration with Engineering, SRE, and Customer Success.
Cross-Functional Leadership: Build and maintain alignment with tech leads, senior managers, and business stakeholders across multiple teams. Drive initiative with urgency, resolve cross-functional friction, and ensure execution stays true to strategic intent.
Executive Communication: Distill complex, ambiguous technical challenges into clear narratives and decision-ready documents for the executive team—including trade-off framing and recommendations tied to business outcomes.