Principal Production Engineer

Crusoe

Crusoe

Product

San Francisco, CA, USA · Sunnyvale, CA, USA

Posted on Apr 15, 2026

Location

San Francisco, CA - US; Sunnyvale, CA - US

Employment Type

Full time

Location Type

On-site

Department

Cloud Engineering

Crusoe is on a mission to accelerate the abundance of energy and intelligence. As the only vertically integrated AI infrastructure company built from the ground up, we own and operate each layer of the stack — from electrons to tokens — to power the world's most ambitious AI workloads. When you join Crusoe, you join a team that is building the future, faster.

We're in the midst of the greatest industrial revolution of our time. The demand for AI compute is boundless, and power is a bottleneck. We're solving that — with an energy-first approach that makes AI infrastructure better for the world and faster for the people innovating with AI.

We're looking for problem-solving, opportunity-finding teammates with a sense of urgency, who believe in the scale of our ambition and thrive on a path not fully paved — people who want to grow their careers alongside a team of experts across energy, manufacturing, data center construction, and cloud services.

If you want to do the most meaningful work of your career, help our customers and partners advance their AI strategies, and be part of a high-performing team that believes in each other, come build with us at Crusoe.

About This Role

Crusoe is building the AI factory — a vertically integrated company spanning power generation, purpose-built data centers, and the cloud platform that frontier AI runs on. We're looking for a Principal Engineer on our Production Engineering team to 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 raw compute translates into usable cloud. At the growth rate Crusoe is operating, the scope of this role expands every quarter. This is a high-ownership, high-autonomy position where you will define observability strategy, drive reliability standards across the organization, and be the kind of engineer who makes the people around them meaningfully better. The problems are novel, the scale is real, and the impact is immediate.

What You'll Be Working On

  • Own the reliability and scalability of Crusoe's cloud infrastructure across compute, storage, and networking by 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 monitoring 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 to influence architecture decisions early, before they become operational debt.

  • Act as a trusted advisor to senior leadership on observability trends, tooling investments, and long-term reliability strategy, bringing a perspective that connects day-to-day operations to multi-year platform direction.

  • 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.

What You'll Bring to the Team

  • Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience

  • 15+ years in infrastructure, networking, or production engineering with meaningful time at companies operating at internet scale such as cloud providers, CDNs, or large-scale social or media platforms.

  • Deep expertise in observability: you've built or scaled telemetry pipelines, instrumented distributed systems end-to-end, and know the difference between metrics that surface insight and metrics that create noise.

  • Strong systems fundamentals across Linux, distributed systems, storage, and compute scheduling. You understand the full stack from hardware up.

  • Hands-on data center experience working with physical infrastructure. You 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.

  • Strong incident command: you lead calmly under pressure, communicate clearly during outages, and run blameless retrospectives that actually improve systems.

Bonus Points

  • Deep networking expertise across 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 including GPU cluster operations, job schedulers like Slurm and Kubernetes, and high-bandwidth interconnects such as InfiniBand and RoCE.

  • Prior principal or staff IC experience where you influenced org-level technical strategy, not just project-level execution.

  • Exposure to sustainability-focused or energy-constrained compute environments.

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

Compensation

Compensation will be paid in the range of $261,000 - $326,000 + Bonus. Restricted Stock Units are included in all offers. Compensation to be determined by the applicant’s education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity and alignment with market data.

Crusoe is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Employment decisions are made without regard to race, color, religion, disability, genetic information, pregnancy, citizenship, marital status, sex/gender, sexual preference/ orientation, gender identity, age, veteran status, national origin, or any other status protected by law or regulation.