Principal Network Architect

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: Crusoe is looking for a Principal Network Architect to define and own the network architecture strategy across our entire infrastructure stack, spanning bare-metal data center switching fabrics and RDMA interconnects to SDN control planes, Kubernetes networking, and cloud-layer overlays. As the industry's first vertically integrated AI infrastructure provider, Crusoe operates at a scale that few companies can match, including a 1.2 GW hyperscale campus in Abilene, TX powering the Stargate project. This is a high-impact, principal-level individual contributor role reporting directly to the Director of Networking, with broad technical authority and cross-organizational influence. In this role, you'll do more than solve today's problems; you'll build the architecture that runs the AI infrastructure of tomorrow. You'll introduce and institutionalize modern networking paradigms like intent-based networking, declarative configuration management, and network source of truth, transforming how Crusoe designs, provisions, and operates its network at hyperscale. What You'll Be Working On: - Hyperscale Data Center Architecture: Own end-to-end network architecture for Crusoe's AI data centers, including spine-leaf fabrics, out-of-band management, RDMA (RoCEv2/InfiniBand), and inter-campus WAN design. - SDN Control Plane Design: Design and evolve SDN control plane architectures for programmable underlay and overlay networking across multi-vendor hardware environments. - Kubernetes Networking: Define CNI selection, network policies, multi-cluster service mesh, and BGP peering architecture across Crusoe's Managed Kubernetes platform. - Intent-Based Networking: Architect IBN frameworks that translate high-level business and operational goals into validated, auto-generated device configurations. - Declarative Networking and GitOps: Establish infrastructure-as-code practices, GitOps-driven network provisioning, and continuous validation pipelines for network state. - Network Source of Truth: Build and own Crusoe's SoT strategy, defining authoritative data models (IPAM, DCIM, CMDB) and ensuring all devices, links, and policies are version-controlled and consistently sourced. - Automation Workflows: Design day-0/1/2 automation using tools like Ansible, Nornir, or Terraform, driven by the network source of truth. - Observability and Telemetry: Define streaming telemetry architecture (gNMI/gRPC), intent verification, and closed-loop remediation pipelines. - Standards and Cross-Functional Leadership: Establish engineering standards and reference architectures, lead architecture reviews, author design documents, and present proposals to senior leadership. - Team Mentorship: Mentor senior and staff network engineers, growing the technical depth and breadth of the broader network engi