Principal Production Engineer

Crusoe; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 261,000 - 326,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Industry competitive pay

Restricted Stock Units

Health insurance options

401(k) with company match

Paid parental leave

Generous paid time off

Job summary

A cutting-edge technology firm in San Francisco is seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the reliability and scalability of its cloud infrastructure. The role requires 15+ years of experience and expertise in infrastructure, distributed systems, and networking. You will define operational standards, mentor engineers, and influence architecture decisions. This position promises significant ownership and impact in a high-growth environment, alongside competitive compensation and excellent benefits.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of experience in infrastructure or production engineering.
• Strong understanding of systems fundamentals and cloud platforms.
• Hands-on experience in data centers.

Responsibilities

• Own the reliability and scalability of cloud infrastructure.
• Build and mature observability tools for incident detection.
• Drive reliability improvements across the cloud stack.

Skills

Infrastructure experience

Networking

Production engineering

Analytical problem-solving

Linux

Distributed systems

Tools

Git

Kubernetes

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 This Role

Crusoe is building the AI factory which is a vertically integrated company spanning power generation, purpose‑built data centers, and the cloud platform that frontier AI runs on. We are looking for our first Principal Engineer on our Production Engineering team. Someone who will 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 that compute translates into usable cloud, and at the growth rate Crusoe is operating, the scope of this role expands with every quarter. This is a high‑ownership, high‑autonomy position where you will set technical direction, drive observability and reliability standards across the organization, and be the kind of engineer that 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 — compute, storage, and networking — 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 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 teams to influence architecture decisions early, before they become operational debt
• Act as a trusted advisor to senior leadership, bringing perspective on observability trends and advocating for the right long‑term technology investments
• 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

• 15+ years of experience in infrastructure, networking, or production engineering — with meaningful time at companies operating at internet scale (cloud providers, CDNs, large‑scale social/media platforms, or similar)
• Strong systems fundamentals: Linux, distributed systems, storage, compute scheduling — you understand the full stack from hardware up
• Hands‑on data center experience: you've done physical infra, 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
• Excellent analytical and problem‑solving skills, including the ability to synthesize ambiguous customer and system signals into clear problem statements and designs
• 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: 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: GPU cluster operations, job schedulers (Slurm, Kubernetes), high‑bandwidth interconnects (InfiniBand, RoCE)
• Prior principal or staff IC role 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.