Principal Engineer, Conductor Platform (CAPE)

Crusoe; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 285,000 - 335,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Equity packages

Paid time off & holidays

Health, dental & vision insurance

Parental leave

401(k) retirement with company match

Job summary

Crusoe is building the future of AI infrastructure at scale. This Principal Engineer role in Cloud Availability sets architecture and standards, guiding teams across hardware, software, and platform services to deliver a unified control plane for 100,000+ GPUs.

You’ll own end-to-end design, drive automation and policy-based lifecycles, and mentor senior engineers while partnering with hardware and datacenter leaders.

Qualifications

• 10+ years building infrastructure-layer systems at scale.
• Deep experience with distributed systems design and state reconciliation.
• Proven track record architecting complex platforms with multiple services.

Responsibilities

• Define and set architecture/standards for Crusoe's AI infra platform.
• Lead design across teams; drive reviews and build-vs-adopt decisions.
• Own phased roadmap from data layers to multi-site automation; mentor engineers.

Skills

10+ years in infrastructure systems

Distributed systems design

Platform architecture

Leadership & mentoring

Graph data models

Observability/telemetry

Go, Rust, C++ programming

Tools

PXE/Redfish/IPMI

Job description

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 Conductor

There is no operating system for the AI datacenter — so we're building one.

Conductor is Crusoe's AI Infrastructure Operating Platform: a unified control plane that treats the entire global GPU fleet as a single programmable system. It is built on twin sources of truth — an observability data platform capturing runtime state from every GPU, NIC, switch, and host, and an inventory & topology graph modeling the intended state of every site, rack, cable, and component. Continuous reconciliation between the two, enforced by policy-gated workflows, drives the complete hardware lifecycle: from New Product Introduction through provisioning, validation, and burn-in to firmware upgrades, repair, and Day-2 operations — at the scale of 100,000+ GPUs.

This is a Principal Engineer role reporting into Cloud Availability, leading development of one of the highest-priority technical charters in the org. You will set the architecture, define the standards, and drive execution across the teams building the platform.

Your Charter — The Problems You'll Own

1. The platform architecture itself. Own the end-to-end design: twin sources of truth, the abstraction and orchestration layer (API gateway, workflow engine, policy engine, state reconciler), and the domain services built on top. You define how the pieces fit together and evolve.

1. The fleet as one logical computer. A topology graph that models every site, rack, host, GPU, switch, and cable as a traversable system of record — answering questions like "if I upgrade this spine switch, which customer workloads are affected?" in one query.

1. Reconciliation as the core loop. Never let the inventory system guess about runtime state, or telemetry guess about intended design. Detect drift between what should exist and what's actually running, and drive automated remediation — a GitOps-style loop for physical infrastructure.

1. Policy-gated lifecycle automation. No host reaches production without passing every gate: BOM validation, attestation, burn-in, network readiness, performance baselines. You design the policy engine that makes fleet growth a software-gated pipeline instead of a manual process.

1. The full hardware lifecycle as code. New Product Introduction, bare-metal provisioning, OS and firmware imaging, dependency-aware rolling firmware upgrades with canary stages and rollback, re-imaging, repair & RMA, and re-admission — orchestrated end to end, replayable via event sourcing.

1. Unified observability plane. One pane that correlates GPU, networking (InfiniBand/RoCE), storage, orchestration, and workload signals at extreme cardinality — so any engineer can diagnose and recover fast, and the platform can act on what it sees.

1. Site autonomy at global scale. Edge agents that keep every site operating through network partitions and reconcile with the global graph when connectivity returns — a distributed-systems problem across dozens of sites.

1. From detection to resolution, automatically. Anomaly detection, blast-radius computation from topology, workload migration, quarantine, RMA, burn-in re-validation, and fleet re-admission — closing the loop with no human in the path for known failure patterns.

1. Structured multi-team orchestration. Replace email and Slack handoffs between hardware, network, compute, and validation teams with policy-checked work orders, SLA tracking, and validation gates built into the platform.

Technical Leadership

• Set the architecture and operating standards for the platform — you define them, you don't inherit them.
• Lead design across multiple teams and services: drive design reviews, make build-vs-adopt calls, and hold the technical bar as the platform grows from pilot site to global fleet.
• Own the phased roadmap from foundational data layers through core lifecycle services to full multi-site automation, and be accountable for the milestones along the way.
• Mentor senior engineers and raise the engineering standard across the org.
• Partner with hardware, network, datacenter, and product leadership to turn operational tribal knowledge into platform capabilities.

Why This Role Is Different

• Scale almost no one gets to work on — a control plane and lifecycle platform spanning 100,000+ GPUs across global sites.
• A problem unique to Crusoe — we own the stack from energy to compute, so the platform manages power, cooling, and thermal headroom as first-class resources, not external constraints.
• Greenfield authority — this is a 0→1 charter. You define how AI infrastructure is operated at scale, for the industry, not just for Crusoe.

What You'll Bring

• 10+ years building infrastructure-layer systems at scale — fleet management, distributed control planes, provisioning and imaging systems, CMDB/inventory platforms, or hardware lifecycle automation. This is a systems-builder role, not a consumer of managed cloud services.
• Deep experience with distributed systems design: state reconciliation, event-driven orchestration, workflow engines, policy enforcement, and systems that act autonomously against live production infrastructure.
• Track record of architecting platforms composed of many services — defining APIs, data models, and dependency tiers that dozens of engineers build against.
• Hands-on fluency with datacenter and GPU/HPC infrastructure — bare-metal provisioning (PXE/Redfish/IPMI), firmware and BIOS management, GPU health telemetry, and InfiniBand/RoCE fabrics.
• Experience designing large-scale observability or telemetry platforms that correlate signals across compute, network, and storage layers at high cardinality.
• Demonstrated technical leadership: driving architecture across multiple teams, mentoring senior engineers, and delivering multi-quarter roadmaps in ambiguous, 0→1 environments.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals in at least one systems language (Go, Rust, C++, or similar) and the judgment to know when to build vs. adopt existing tooling.
• Experience with graph data models for infrastructure topology, or with security attestation / SBOM tooling, is a strong plus.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation and equity packages
• Restricted Stock Units
• Paid time off, paid holidays & leave of absence programs
• Comprehensive health, dental & vision insurance
• Employer contributions to HSA account
• Paid parental leave
• Paid life insurance, short-term and long-term disability
• Professional development & tuition reimbursement
• Mental health & wellness support
• Commuter benefits (parking & transit)
• Cell phone stipend
• 401(k) Retirement plan with company match up to 4% of salary
• Volunteer time off
• Global travel insurance & emergency assistance
• Daily meals allowance
• Additional perks & programs specific to location

Compensation Range

Compensation will be paid in the range of up to $285,000 – $335,000 + Bonus. Restricted Stock Units are included in all offers. Compensation to be determined by the applicant's knowledge, education, 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.