--- title: 'Principal Sustaining Engineering Manager - Spark at Crusoe' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/principal-sustaining-engineering-manager-spark-crusoe-denver-fq3t3ajv8y89' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-11-06' --- # Principal Sustaining Engineering Manager - Spark at Crusoe - **Company:** [Crusoe](https://feeny.ai/companies/crusoe) - **Location:** Denver, CO / United States - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-10-05 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-06 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/crusoe/6f9bc9a8-117f-470b-b180-12abdd5408d8 ## 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 the Role: Crusoe is a vertically integrated AI Factory company accelerating energy and compute infrastructure. We believe that “speed is the only moat” and our vertical integration allows us to design, manufacture, and deploy modular power and compute infrastructure at market leading speed and cost. We are seeking a Sustaining Engineering Leader to own how Spark physical modules perform post-deployment and drive continuous improvement. While Product Management defines future generations and NPI delivers them for production, you own each generation once it ramps: fleet reliability, field failures, configuration, component obsolescence, and the design modifications required for full service life performance. In this role, “hardware” and “product” refers to the physical infrastructure of the Spark module: structural steel modules, RPPs, DLC cooling loops, CDUs, chillers, piping headers, electrical and mechanical systems, and power distribution gear. Compute hardware (servers, GPUs, storage, networking, and rack specifications) is owned by Cloud Product. Sitting on the Spark design engineering team, you capture how deployed Spark modules perform in service and aggregate the lessons learned and required changes into the design process, so the next version is more reliable, serviceable, and cost-effective. Working with Data Center Facility Operations and Field Operations, you are the definitive evidence source for Product Management and NPI, turning field data into design requirements and acceptance criteria. You start as the single-threaded leader of this function and build the team as the fleet expands. What You'll Be Working On: I. Fleet Ownership, Facility Ops Interface & Field Issues - Year 1 Ramp & Handover: Participate in production release and ramp readiness reviews for deploying generations as the receiving organization. Establish as-built baselines, spares strategies, service intervals, and repair-vs-replace policies prior to initial fleet launch. - Facility Operations Feedback Loop: Serve as the primary engineering interface with the Data Center Facility Operations team. Gather site-level field feedback across broader facility power, thermal, and environmental systems to analyze how site-wide operational dynamics impact individual Spark modules. - Fleet Reliability: Own subsystem failure rates, mean time between failures (MTBF), and repeat failure metrics. Define the required telemetry every deployed unit must report to ensure operational visibility. - Closed-Loop Corrective Action: Stand up and run the Failure Reporting, Analysis, and Corrective Action System (FRACAS) function. Drive root-cause analysis to closure with verified fixes, containing safety or fleet-wide risks immediately when issues arise. II. Change, Configuration & Obsolescence - Post-Release Change Control: Own engineering change orders (ECOs) for fielded generations, quantifying cost and fleet impacts prior to approval. - Configuration Baseline: Maintain as-built and as-maintained configuration baselines, ensuring field retrofits precisely target affected units. - Proactive Component Obsolescence: Manage component lifecycles using Diminishing Manufacturing Sources and Material Shortages (DMSMS) practices - modeling last-time buys against fleet demand and qualifying alternate parts before component shortages occur. - Retrofits & Maintenance: Issue change packages, preventive maintenance schedules, and acceptance criteria for Field Operations execution. III. Feedback Loop to Product Management & NPI - Requirements into Product: Convert fleet and facility operations data into quantified design requirements for future Product Requirement Document (PRD) iterations. - Qualification into NPI: Supply field-derived acceptance criteria to NPI, ensuring historical failure modes are designed out of future module generations before release. - Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): Own reliability, serviceability, and maintenance inputs driving Spark unit economics and long-term TCO. - Serviceability Advocacy: Represent maintainability and serviceability in design reviews, using field data to influence future hardware architecture. What You'll Bring to the Team: Education - Required: Bachelor's degree in Mechanical, Electrical, Reliability, or a closely related engineering discipline. ## Experience - 10 to 15 years in sustaining, reliability, or product support engineering for deployed capital hardware or infrastructure assets. - Track record of converting field performance data into design changes that measurably reduce failure rates and service costs. - Experience building sustaining engineering processes (root-cause analysis frameworks, review boards, spares policies) from the ground up. - Hands-on management of component obsolescence and supplier end-of-life transitions for long-lifecycle hardware. Technical Depth - Reliability Engineering: Failure Reporting, Analysis, and Corrective Action Systems (FRACAS), structured root-cause analysis (8D, 5-Why), MTBF modeling, and population failure rate analysis. - Configuration Management: PLM workflows, serial-level effectivity, change order management, and as-built control. - Obsolescence & Service Economics: Diminishing Manufacturing Sources and Material Shortages (DMSMS) practices, last-time buy modeling, spares planning, and unit service cost drivers. Bonus Points: - Experience with modular, containerized, or prefabricated infrastructure products in the field. - Direct familiarity with liquid-cooled data center hardware. - The persistence to chase root causes past obvious answers, paired with the practical judgment needed to manage fleet disruptions. 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 $225,000 -$255,000 + 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. ## About Crusoe ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Crusoe is an energy-first AI infrastructure company that designs, builds, and operates hyperscale data centers and a cloud platform purpose-built for artificial intelligence workloads. - **Entity Type**: Private (Series E) - **Headquarters**: Denver, Colorado, USA - **Founded**: 2018 - **Founders**: Chase Lochmiller and Cully Cavness ## Core Business - Primary industry/industries: AI Infrastructure, Cloud Computing, Data Centers, Clean Energy - Target customers: Enterprise AI companies, AI-native startups, research institutions, government agencies (B2B) - **Mission**: "Accelerate the abundance of energy and intelligence." ## Products & Services - **Crusoe Cloud**: An AI-optimized cloud platform purpose-built for AI workloads, featuring high-performance NVIDIA and AMD compute, accelerated storage, and optimized RDMA networking. Claims to deploy models up to 20x faster and cut costs by up to 81%. - **Crusoe Managed Inference**: A managed AI inference service built with Crusoe's proprietary MemoryAlloy technology, offering best-in-class speed, throughput, and reliability. Features the Crusoe Intelligence Foundry for model selection and API key management. - **AI Data Center Infrastructure**: Vertically integrated design, build, and operation of hyperscale AI factories (e.g., the 1.2 GW Stargate campus in Abilene, TX). Modular, scalable construction for power-hungry AI workloads. - **Crusoe Managed Kubernetes & Slurm**: Managed orchestration services that eliminate operational overhead for customers. - **Crusoe AutoClusters**: Fault-tolerant, managed cluster services for large-scale AI training. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed (private company). - **Key Metric**: Raised over $1.8B+ in total funding (Series E in 2024 was $1B+; Series D in 2024 was $600M; Series C in 2021 was $350M). - **Notable Investors/Partners**: NVIDIA, NYDIG, GE Vernova, Redwood Materials, Tallgrass, AMD. The company has also partnered with leading energy and technology firms to power its data centers. - **Growth Signals**: Divested bitcoin mining business to NYDIG in 2023 to focus exclusively on AI infrastructure; broke ground on the 1.2 GW Stargate campus in Abilene, TX; expanded into Europe with a geothermal/hydro-powered deployment in Iceland; announced 1.8 GW Wyoming data center with Tallgrass; acquired GPU memory optimization startup Atero and established a Tel Aviv office. ## Competitive Advantages - **Energy-First Approach**: The company’s core differentiator is its vertical integration starting from energy sourcing. It uses "environmentally aligned power sources" (wind, solar, hydropower, geothermal, natural gas with carbon capture) to power its AI factories, including pioneering technology to convert wasted natural gas into energy. - **Vertical Integration**: Controls the entire stack—from finding innovative energy sources to building and managing hyperscale data centers and operating the cloud platform. - **NVIDIA Partnership**: Close partnership with NVIDIA, providing access to the latest and highest-performance GPU hardware for its cloud and infrastructure. - **Proven Performance**: Claims 99.98% uptime, 100% customer satisfaction score, and significant cost/performance advantages (up to 81% cost reduction). ## Strategic Focus - **Massive Infrastructure Expansion**: Aggressively scaling its data center footprint, with major projects in Abilene, Texas (Stargate) and Wyoming (Tallgrass), and expansion into Europe. - **Deepening AI Cloud**: Continuing to build out its Crusoe Cloud platform with managed services (Kubernetes, Slurm, AutoClusters) to make it easier for AI companies to use their infrastructure. - **Responsible AI**: Emphasizing sustainability and responsible AI governance, as evidenced by achieving ISO 42001 certification and publishing an ESG report. - **Acquisition-led Growth**: Acquired Atero (GPU memory optimization) to enhance its core technology stack. ## Why Work Here - **Mission-Driven**: The company is united by a tangible mission: "Accelerate the abundance of energy and intelligence." Employees report high levels of engagement (92% proud to work there per internal survey). - **Massive Growth Trajectory**: Crusoe is at the center of the AI infrastructure boom, building some of the world's most powerful AI factories. For job seekers, this means exposure to cutting-edge technology and the opportunity to scale a company from a startup to an industry leader. - **Culture**: The company values "moving fast and making things," continuous learning, and collective genius. It describes itself as an "AI factory company" that values velocity and impact. - **Work Policy**: Hybrid/Office presence required in most roles. Office locations include: Denver (HQ), San Francisco, Sunnyvale, Bellevue, Tulsa, Dublin (Ireland), and Tel Aviv (Israel). - **Benefits**: Competitive compensation & equity, comprehensive health & wellness, mental health resources, retirement plans, paid time off, leave of absence programs, learning & development, volunteer time off, daily meals allowance, and other location-specific perks. - **Engineering Culture**: Strong emphasis on technical excellence, working with large-scale systems, and pioneering new approaches to energy and infrastructure. The company values candidates' "AI fluency" in its hiring process. ## Sources 1. [crusoe.ai](https://www.crusoe.ai/) 2. [crusoe.ai/careers](https://www.crusoe.ai/about/careers) 3. [crusoe.ai/about/culture](https://www.crusoe.ai/about/careers/culture) 4. 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