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Salary: USD 225,000 - 255,000 / annual
Crusoe is a vertically integrated AI infrastructure company building modular power and compute systems to accelerate AI workloads. As Director of Sustaining Engineering for Spark, you will own the performance, reliability, and lifecycle management of deployed units after they leave production ramp.
You are the single-threaded owner of the installed base and serve as the evidence source that Product Management and New Product Introduction depend on. You do not set the roadmap or run the factory; you own fleet reliability, field failures, configuration management, obsolescence, and design changes that keep deployed units performing throughout their service life.
First-year priorities include standing up FRACAS (root cause evidence standard) and the Failure Review Board, establishing the as-built configuration baseline, defining spares and service intervals, and participating in production release readiness reviews for the first generation deploying in early 2027.
Key responsibilities span three areas:
1. Fleet Ownership & Field Issues: Take technical ownership of each generation after production ramp through a defined handover from NPI. Own failure rate by subsystem, mean time between failures, and repeat failure rate. Run FRACAS and chair the Failure Review Board, closing every failure with root cause, verified fix, and proof of effectiveness. For safety or fleet-wide risk, contain first and settle attribution after. Own retrofit decisions and sequencing.
2. Change, Configuration & Obsolescence: Own engineering change for fielded generations with cost and fleet impact quantified before approval. Maintain configuration baseline and reconcile as-maintained against it. Run a proactive DMSMS (Diminishing Manufacturing Sources and Material Shortages) program, modeling last-time buys and qualifying alternates. Issue engineering change packages, kit definitions, preventive maintenance intervals, and acceptance criteria.
3. Feeding Product Management and NPI: Convert fleet evidence into quantified design requirements. Supply field-derived requirements and acceptance criteria so failures the fleet has seen are designed out in the next generation. Own reliability and service inputs to unit economics. Represent serviceability and maintainability in design reviews using fleet data.
Requirements:
- Bachelor's degree in Mechanical, Electrical, Reliability Engineering, or closely related discipline
- 10–15 years in sustaining, reliability, or product support engineering for deployed capital equipment or infrastructure hardware
- Direct ownership of a fielded installed base, with field data converted into design change that measurably reduced failure rate or service cost
- Obsolescence and lifecycle management experience on products whose service life exceeds component lifespans
- Experience standing up a function from nothing, including processes and partner agreements
- Technical depth in FRACAS, structured root cause analysis, MTBF and population failure rate analysis
- Change & Configuration: PLM, change order workflow, as-built control, serial-level effectivity
- Obsolescence: DMSMS practice, end-of-life monitoring, last-time buy modeling, alternate part qualification
- Systems fluency: electrical, mechanical, and thermal command sufficient to adjudicate root cause on modular power and compute products, including liquid cooling
- Service economics: spares, service cost per unit, and the link between availability and revenue
- Preferred: experience with modular, containerized, or prefabricated infrastructure products; familiarity with liquid-cooled data center hardware (CDU and rack-level cooling interfaces)
