# Senior Engineering Manager, Management Plane Systems

**Company:** [Crusoe](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/crusoe)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA
**Role:** Engineering Management
**Salary:** $237k – $288k/yr
**Experience:** 10+ years
**Skills:** Ansible, Nornir, Napalm, Salt, Netbox, Nautobot, Gnmi, gRPC, OpenTelemetry, BGP, Vxlan, Evpn, Yang, Netconf, Restconf
**Posted:** 2026-06-02

> This Senior Engineering Manager will lead a team responsible for the architecture, development, and production operation of Crusoe's SDN Management Plane. The role involves building automation and observability systems, defining provisioning and onboarding automation, and applying AI/ML to network operations.

## Job Description

## What You'll Be Working On:

### Platform Architecture & Engineering

* Own the architecture, development, and production operation of Crusoe's SDN Management Plane, the automation and observability layer that manages our network fleet across all regions.
* Build and operate CI/CD pipelines for network configuration: automated testing, policy validation, and push-on-green delivery of network changes from intent to production.
* Design and implement the software systems that enforce reconciliation between declared and actual network state, detect configuration drift, and trigger automated remediation workflows.
* Define provisioning and onboarding automation for new nodes, regions, and customer environments, ensuring consistent, policy-compliant network configuration at scale.

### Observability and Intelligent Operations

* Drive the design of network observability systems including streaming telemetry (gNMI/gRPC), synthetic probing, anomaly detection, and real-time traffic monitoring across GPU clusters.
* Design and implement self-healing network capabilities: closed-loop automation with appropriate guardrails that detects, diagnoses, and resolves network faults without human intervention.
* Set the technical vision for applying GenAI and machine learning to network operations, from intelligent anomaly detection to natural-language-driven network management.

### Cross-Functional Partnership

* Partner closely with Control Plane and Data Plane teams to ensure clean software interfaces between layers, and with infrastructure and compute teams to support GPU cluster networking requirements.
* Act as the internal platform owner for network automation: treat other engineering teams as customers with real product requirements, not just consumers of scripts.

### People Leadership

* Lead, mentor, and grow a team of senior and staff-level software and network automation engineers.
* Set technical standards, review architecture and design decisions, own team performance and development.
* Foster a high-ownership engineering culture focused on shipping production software, not just maintaining tooling.

## What You'll Bring to the Team:

* 10+ years of experience in network software engineering, network automation platform engineering, or infrastructure platform engineering.
* 5 to 7+ years managing senior and staff-level software engineers, with demonstrated ability to build and scale a platform team.
* Proven track record of architecting and shipping production-grade automation and observability systems, not just configuring or consuming existing tooling.
* Deep hands-on experience building network automation platforms: architecting and owning systems that other engineering teams depend on as internal customers.
* Strong fluency in network automation frameworks and tooling: Ansible, Nornir, Napalm, Salt, or equivalent. Proven experience building production CI/CD pipelines for network infrastructure, including test coverage, rollback logic, and policy validation.
* Experience with network source-of-truth systems (NetBox, Nautobot, or custom CMDB) and building software-driven reconciliation loops between declared and observed network state.
* Familiarity with network telemetry and observability systems: gNMI, gRPC streaming telemetry, OpenTelemetry, or equivalent synthetic probing and monitoring architectures.
* Solid understanding of network protocols and SDN architectures: BGP, VXLAN, EVPN, and familiarity with control plane systems (OVN/OVS preferred) at the level needed to automate them effectively.
* Experience with network modeling standards: YANG, Netconf, RESTCONF, or intent-based networking abstractions.
* Strong software engineering background with fluency in Python and/or Go. Able to set code quality standards, define testing strategies, and review complex platform code at a staff engineer level.
* Demonstrated ability to lead in fast-moving, execution-heavy environments: comfortable building from scratch, shipping iteratively, and owning production systems end-to-end.
* Track record of managing platform teams with internal customers, able to balance roadmap commitments with operational reliability and stakeholder needs.
* Clear platform mindset: you have built software that other teams depend on, defined its interfaces, and owned its reliability as a product.

## Bonus Points

* Experience applying GenAI, ML, or AIOps techniques to network operations: anomaly detection, predictive failure analysis, or natural-language configuration interfaces.
* Background in AI infrastructure or GPU cluster networking environments.
* Contributions to open-source network automation or observability projects.
* Experience with release management and change control systems for large-scale network infrastructure.
* Familiarity with RDMA/RoCE or high-performance networking in GPU environments.
* P4 or programmable networking pipeline experience.

## 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/month

## Compensation Range

Compensation will be paid in the range of up to $237,000 – $288,000 + 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.

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