Senior Site Reliability & Software Engineering Manager Job Palo Alto area,California USA,Software Development

Built to set the gold standard for integrated AI infrastructure

Crux AI is a newly formed, U.S.

-based integrated AI infrastructure company created to remove the physical and operational constraints on consequential AI ambitions. Crux brings together power, high-density data centers, TPU silicon, networking, orchestration software, and ongoing operations as one integrated system.

Crux is being capitalized to plan every layer together, develop each one to demanding standards, and operate the whole system with efficiency and reliability. That gives hyperscalers, frontier AI labs, sovereign customers, enterprises, and AI-native companies greater freedom to pursue the AI they are here to create.

Crux AI is led by CEO,
Ben Treynor Sloss
, who spent over two decades in executive technical leadership at Google and founded the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) disciplin
e. At Crux AI, we treat operations fundamentally as a software engineering problem.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

We are recruiting founding Senior Site Reliability and Software Engineering Managers to build and lead our initial fleet reliability engineering teams in Palo Alto, CA.

In this organization, there is no separate software development team. Your team owns the software, control plane, telemetry, and automated remediation controllers that keep multi-gigawatt TPU clusters provisioned, resilient, and continuously executing customer AI workloads.

This is a true hands‑on, builder seat, not a supervisory position. In the early days, you will write the first remediation controllers, set reliability baselines, and take initial pages yourself to stay close to the work before expanding your team. You will lead an elite group of unusually senior software and reliability engineers: engineers with significantly greater technical and software depth than traditional operational SRE orgs.

You must thrive on independence and revel in ambiguity, turning unknowns into concrete engineering priorities in a fast‑paced, high-growth environment. While you will devise and participate in initial on‑call rotations, your core mandate is to combine SRE disciplines with extensive AI/ML automation to drive operational pages down to zero.

In this role, you will:

Build & Lead Senior Engineering Teams:
Recruit, lead, and mentor an initial team of senior software and reliability engineers across Palo Alto and Europe as fleet capacity ramps rapidly.
Automate Pages to Zero:
Own fleet availability end-to-end; establish on‑call rotations while relentlessly developing self‑healing systems and predictive remediation to eliminate manual pages.
Embed AI/ML into SRE Disciplines:
Apply agentic techniques, machine learning models, and automated diagnostic workflows extensively to telemetry collection, root‑cause analysis, and predictive cluster recovery.
Own Bare‑Metal & Fleet Lifecycle Software:
Drive software engineering for bare‑metal node provisioning, firmware deployment, thermal/stress burn‑in validation, host/TPU health monitoring, and decommissioning.
Control Plane & Fabric Reliability:
Own software reliability for cluster orchestration, scheduling, capacity allocation APIs, and high‑performance TPU host/interconnect networks.
Define Observability & SLOs:
Establish customer‑facing SLIs/SLOs (job goodput, time‑to‑detect, node availability) and build the telemetry pipelines serving operators, executives, and customers.

SIGNALS OF SUCCESS After 60 days in this role:

Baseline reliability framework defined (v1 SLOs, severity structure, change management); first AI/ML‑driven automated remediation controller shipped to production; recruiting active for senior engineering hires in Palo Alto.

After 6 months:

First TPU cluster brought online under your team’s automated acceptance criteria;…