Engineering Manager, SDN Control Plane

Crusoe Energy Systems LLC

Job Overview

Location

San Francisco, CA - US

Job Type

Full-time

Full Job Description

📋 Description

• 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.
• In this hands-on leadership role, you will own the services on the network control plane that program multi-tenant virtual networks across large-scale GPU fleets.
• Unlike generic networking manager roles, this position focuses on delivering control-plane scale and reliability on aggressive timelines, often moving features from commit to production within days.
• Technical Ownership: You will help define the roadmap for the VPC control plane and drive the evolution of network virtualization systems (such as OVN/OVS) that deliver VPCs, subnets, security groups, load balancing, NAT, and internet/hybrid connectivity.
• Architecture & Scale: You will contribute to the design of distributed control-plane services: intent APIs, state reconciliation, network policy compilation, and southbound programming of hosts and DPUs, while driving scalability well beyond current fleet size.
• Production Execution: You will support reliability engineering, convergence and API-latency benchmarking, regression prevention, and incident response, ensuring operational excellence within 3-6 month execution cycles.
• People Leadership: You will mentor and grow a team of mid-level to senior distributed systems engineers, setting technical standards and fostering a high-performance culture of accountability.
• Collaboration: You will partner closely with data-plane teams (XDP/eBPF, DPDK, DPU offload) and cloud product teams to deliver low-latency, highly available networking for multi-tenant GPU clusters.
• Solid Experience: At least 6-8+ years in distributed systems or cloud networking engineering, with 2-4+ years specifically managing engineering talent.
• Technical Depth: Strong knowledge of SDN and network virtualization: overlay networking (VXLAN/Geneve), VPC constructs, routing (BGP/EVPN), and control-plane architectures such as OVN/OVS or equivalent.
• Distributed Systems Expertise: Hands-on experience building large-scale control planes: state reconciliation, consensus and consistency trade-offs, API design, and fleet-wide configuration propagation (Go, Kubernetes-style controllers, or similar).
• Reliability Focus: A strong understanding of operating multi-tenant cloud services: SLOs, convergence-time and scale benchmarking, graceful degradation, and blast-radius containment.
• Execution Mindset: The ability to resolve complex technical challenges in a fast-moving, execution-heavy environment.

🎯 Requirements

• At least 6-8+ years in distributed systems or cloud networking engineering, with 2-4+ years specifically managing engineering talent.
• Strong knowledge of SDN and network virtualization: overlay networking (VXLAN/Geneve), VPC constructs, routing (BGP/EVPN), and control-plane architectures such as OVN/OVS or equivalent.
• Hands-on experience building large-scale control planes: state reconciliation, consensus and consistency trade-offs, API design, and fleet-wide configuration propagation (Go, Kubernetes-style controllers, or similar).
• A strong understanding of operating multi-tenant cloud services: SLOs, convergence-time and scale benchmarking, graceful degradation, and blast-radius containment.

🏖️ 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

Skills & Technologies

Kubernetes

Hybrid

$215k-260k

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Crusoe Energy Systems LLC

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About Crusoe Energy Systems LLC

Crusoe Energy Systems is building Crusoe Cloud, an AI cloud platform that provides managed AI services and AI data center infrastructure. They cater to businesses seeking to accelerate AI solution development with optimized models and high-performance computing. The company utilizes environmentally aligned power sources, including wind, solar, and natural gas, to power its data centers. With features like managed Kubernetes and Slurm, Crusoe simplifies operations and ensures reliability with 24/7 support. Crusoe is expanding its reach, including a strategic European expansion with its first data center in Norway. Crusoe recently raised $1.375 billion at a valuation above $10 billion.

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