Senior Staff Software Engineer, SDN Architecture

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 As a Senior Staff Software Engineer for SDN Architecture, you will be a driving technical force behind the software-defined networking stack that powers Crusoe's AI-first cloud. You will design and build high-performance networking solutions optimized for AI and HPC workloads, working deeply across the Linux kernel, packet processing pipelines, and network virtualization to help deliver the extreme throughput and low latency that massive GPU clusters demand. You will act as a senior technical contributor and a trusted voice in architecture decisions, partnering closely with Principal Engineers and engineering leadership to shape direction while owning significant portions of the roadmap yourself. This role suits a deep-systems engineer who thrives at the intersection of hardware accelerators and software control planes, and who enjoys raising the technical bar of the teams around them. You will collaborate closely with Product, Hardware, and Infrastructure teams to deliver a reliable, scalable networking fabric that aligns with Crusoe's mission to innovate sustainably. What You'll Be Working On - SDN Execution & Roadmap Contribution: Contribute to and help refine the technical direction for Software-Defined Networking, translating strategy into concrete plans, milestones, and measurable outcomes for your area of ownership. - Architecture & Design: Participate in and help lead architecture reviews, author design documents for major SDN components, and provide thorough code reviews for critical services. - Kernel & Driver Optimization: Build and optimize Linux kernel modules and high-performance drivers using technologies such as XDP, eBPF, AF_XDP, and DPDK. - Fabric Design: Help design and implement network architectures for GPU-to-GPU fabrics, high-speed Ethernet, and specialized AI clusters. - Hardware Integration: Implement and tune virtualization features such as SR-IOV, vDPA, and virtio, and help integrate advanced SmartNICs, DPUs, or IPUs into the stack. - Performance Engineering: Troubleshoot complex production issues and perform deep performance tuning to maximize throughput and minimize latency and improve future designs based on learnings. - Technology Evaluation: Evaluate emerging SDN and NFV technologies, and contribute to open-source projects where strategically relevant, sharing findings with the broader engineering org. - Mentorship: Mentor engineers across the stack, review their designs and code, and help build a culture of engineering excellence. - Cross Functional: Partnering with software and operation teams to implement, execute, deploy and manage your architecture designs while incorporating feedback along the way. What You'll Bring to the Team - High-Performance Networking Experience: 8+ years of experience building and operating large-…