Data Center Systems Engineer, R&D

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 a vertically integrated AI infrastructure company with a mission to accelerate the abundance of energy and intelligence. Our competitive advantage-"Speed is the only moat"-is directly tied to our ability to rapidly design, deploy, and optimize our modular power and compute infrastructure.

We are seeking a Principal Systems Integration Engineer to join our R&D team as the senior technical authority responsible for defining the future of Crusoe's data center architecture. You will evaluate next-generation technologies-working with emerging startups, established industry providers, and research institutions-and lead the development of system-level integration concepts that advance Crusoe's infrastructure from pilot-scale validation through hyperscale deployment.

This is a rare role in the industry. At most companies, power engineers never talk to compute architects, and facility designers work in isolation from software teams. As part of Crusoe's R&D organization, you will work at the seams between these disciplines-scanning the industry for emerging technologies, building relationships with the companies and researchers developing them, defining reference architectures for future platforms, and partnering with engineering teams across the company to take R&D concepts from bench-scale evaluation to production deployment.

If you want to shape the next generation of AI data center technologies, this is the role.

What You'll Be Working On:

• Future Architecture Definition: Lead the development of next-generation data center reference architectures that integrate across electrical, mechanical, thermal, and compute domains. Evaluate how emerging technologies reshape design assumptions and define the architectural path from pilot-scale validation through hyperscale deployment.
• Technology Evaluation & Industry Scanning: Continuously scan the industry for emerging technologies, new vendor capabilities, and evolving standards that could impact data center architecture. Lead structured evaluations of candidate technologies through a full-system lens-assessing not just point performance, but how each technology integrates within the broader infrastructure and scales from prototype to production.
• Systems Integration: Define and maintain the systems-level architecture that governs how Crusoe's infrastructure layers interface and co-optimize. Ensure coherence across engineering disciplines and prevent design decisions in one domain from creating constraints elsewhere.
• Pilot-to-Hyperscale Progression: Guide emerging technologies through the full lifecycle-from initial evaluation and bench-scale testing through pilot deployment, production validation, and hyperscale rollout. Define the technical criteria and milestones that determine readiness at each stage.
• R&D Technical Leadership: Serve as the principal technical voice within the R&D organization on infrastructure architecture. Drive feasibility assessments, lead design reviews for pilot programs, and provide senior technical input on go/no-go decisions for emerging technologies.
• Specifications & Standards: Author high-level system specifications, interface control documents, and design standards that inform future platform development. Translate R&D findings into actionable engineering guidance for production teams.
• Engineering Team Partnership: Partner with engineering teams across the company as R&D's primary technical interface-sharing insights from technology evaluations, translating domain-specific decisions into system-wide implications, and ensuring R&D outputs are aligned with the needs of the teams building and deploying infrastructure.
• External Partnerships: Build and maintain technical relationships with industry providers, emerging startups, OEMs, academic research groups, and national…