About the Role:Crusoe is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager, SDN Control Plane to lead the team building the scalable control plane for VPC networking, the Crusoe Cloud frontend network. In this hands-on senior leadership role, you will own the architecture, implementation, and production operation of the distributed systems 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.
What You'll Be Working On:- Technical Ownership: You will define the roadmap for the VPC control plane and lead 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 oversee 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 lead 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 senior and staff-level 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.
What You'll Bring to the Team:- Extensive Experience: At least 10+ years in distributed systems or cloud networking engineering, with 5-7+ years specifically managing senior/staff-level talent.
- Technical Depth: Deep 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.
Bonus Points- Experience with DPU/SmartNIC-programmed dataplanes, cloud load balancing or NAT at scale, network security policy engines, or open-source contributions to OVN/OVS or SDN projects
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 RangeCompensation will be paid in the range of up to $250,000 - $300,000 + 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.
