Crusoe
Senior Staff Optics Engineer, Network Qualification & Strategy
$250K–$300K
San Francisco, CA - US +2 · On-site · Senior Staff · Full-time · Posted Oct 6, 2026
- Location
- San Francisco, CA - US
Sunnyvale, CA - US
Bellevue, WA - US - Experience
- 12+ years in optical transport networking, including 5+ years as an architect or senior technical lead designing production DWDM networks at service provider, hyperscaler, or cloud scale.
- Education
- Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Optical Engineering, Physics, or a related technical field; Master’s preferred.
About the job
Defines Crusoe’s optical network strategy and architecture, selecting and scaling optical transport infrastructure for data center, metro, regional, and long-haul networks.
What you'll do
- Develop optical architecture, capacity plans, and platform selection, including vendor evaluations, RFPs, and interoperability testing.
- Set fiber and route strategy and define optical automation, observability, reliability, and incident-response practices.
- Establish engineering standards and runbooks, partner across teams, and mentor engineers as the optical function grows.
What they ask for
- Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Optical Engineering, Physics, or a related technical field.
- Hands-on expertise designing, commissioning, and troubleshooting optical platforms and production DWDM networks.
- Strong command of optical fundamentals and experience with coherent technologies, including pluggable and embedded transponders.
- Experience defining optical network architecture and roadmaps, capacity planning, cost-per-bit modeling, and leading vendor evaluations and negotiations.
Nice to have
- Master’s degree.
- Experience in AI/ML or hyperscale environments, open/disaggregated optical systems, optical automation, or fiber acquisition and route engineering.
Pay
up to $250,000 - $300,000 USD + bonus (compensation; base salary or total pay not specified)
Tools
DWDM, Ciena WaveLogic, Nokia PSE, 400ZR/ZR+, 800ZR, OpenConfig, gNMI, TAPI
AI focus
Architects optical transport capacity connecting AI compute clusters and carrying AI training and inference traffic between campuses.
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