Senior Staff Optics Engineer, Network Qualification & Strategy

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 building the physical and software backbone that powers the world's most demanding AI workloads, and our networking team sits at the center of that mission — designing and operating the high-performance fabrics that connect thousands of GPUs into unified compute clusters. As Sr. Staff Optics Engineer, Network Qualification & Strategy, you will own the technical strategy, qualification, and lifecycle management of optical transceivers and interconnect technologies across Crusoe's data center fleet. This is a highly visible, cross-functional role that directly influences network reliability, cost, and scalability at a moment when optics choices (400G, 800G, and beyond) are among the most consequential decisions in AI infrastructure build-outs. The ideal candidate is a deeply technical optics/networking expert who thrives at the intersection of hardware engineering, vendor strategy, and operational rigor — someone equally comfortable in a lab characterizing signal integrity as they are in a boardroom negotiating a multi-year supply agreement. This is a full-time position reporting into Networking Engineering, with the opportunity to shape optics strategy from the ground up as Crusoe scales its global fleet. What You'll Be Working On: Optics Qualification Program: Design and run the end-to-end qualification process for optical transceivers, cables, and interconnects (DAC/AOC/pluggable optics), including signal integrity, thermal, interoperability, and long-term reliability testing. Technology Roadmap & Strategy: Define Crusoe's multi-generation optics strategy (400G 800G 1.6T), evaluating emerging technologies like linear pluggable optics (LPO), co-packaged optics (CPO), and coherent DWDM for scale-out and scale-across fabrics. Vendor & Supply Chain Management: Own relationships with optics and component vendors, driving RFQs, cost negotiations, second-source strategies, and supply chain risk mitigation to ensure availability at scale. Failure Analysis & RCA: Lead root cause analysis for optics-related field failures, partnering with vendors and internal ops teams to drive corrective actions and improve fleet-wide reliability. Cross-Functional Partnership: Collaborate closely with SDN, physical network design, data center operations, and procurement teams to align optics selection with fabric architecture and deployment timelines. Standards & Interoperability: Represent Crusoe in industry standards bodies and multi-source agreements (MSAs) relevant to optical interconnects, ensuring the company's requirements are reflected in evolving specs. Documentation & Enablement: Build qualification test plans, acceptance criteria, and technical documentation that scale across the organization and inform build partners and ven…

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