Senior Staff Engineer, Platform R&d

Crusoe Crusoe · Data AI · San Francisco, CA - US · Cloud Engineering

Senior Staff Engineer, Platform R&D to embed research and development capacity into the Managed Platform Services (MAPS) team. The role focuses on accelerating delivery through rapid experimentation, AI-augmented prototyping, and hands-on product scoping, operating as a force multiplier across teams without single product ownership. Key responsibilities include leading fast-cycle R&D, evaluating new platform capabilities, providing senior technical guidance, defining scope for early-stage work, and identifying opportunities for platform consolidation.

What you'd actually do

  1. Lead fast-cycle R&D efforts across MAPS domains — using AI-augmented workflows to prototype not just the recommended solution, but the full solution space. Compress the time from idea to working proof-of-concept so teams can make better decisions faster.
  2. Partner with engineering and product to evaluate the viability of new platform capabilities. Identify where net-new products overlap with or can extend existing platform services, reducing duplication and accelerating time-to-value.
  3. Float across all MAPS teams and domains as an embedded R&D resource. Provide senior technical guidance on architecture, implementation approach, and build-vs-extend tradeoffs without being constrained to a single product area.
  4. Own the early, fuzzy stages of product and feature work — defining scope, surfacing risk, and producing concrete artifacts (prototypes, technical specs, feasibility assessments) that make downstream engineering and product work faster and more precise.
  5. Continuously identify commonalities across domains and surface opportunities to consolidate, reuse, or generalize platform capabilities — keeping the MAPS portfolio coherent as it grows.

Skills

Required

  • 10+ years of software development experience
  • significant time in senior individual contributor or staff-level roles
  • Proven ability to rapidly build high-fidelity prototypes across a range of technologies
  • Demonstrated experience using AI tools to accelerate software development, research, and technical decision-making
  • Strong understanding of managed cloud services, distributed systems, and platform engineering patterns
  • Ability to engage early in ambiguous product spaces, ask the right questions, and translate fuzzy requirements into scoped, buildable increments
  • Exceptional ability to synthesize and communicate complex technical tradeoffs to both engineering and product audiences
  • Able to operate without formal authority — earning trust across teams through technical credibility, clear thinking, and consistent delivery
  • Experience with modern compiled or systems languages (Go, Rust, Java, C++)
  • cloud-native infrastructure

Nice to have

  • AI-augmented workflows

What the JD emphasized

  • 10+ years of software development experience
  • significant time in senior individual contributor or staff-level roles
  • Proven ability to rapidly build high-fidelity prototypes
  • Demonstrated experience using AI tools to accelerate software development, research, and technical decision-making
  • comfortable moving fast
  • exploring multiple approaches in parallel
  • knowing when good enough is the right call
  • push their limits

Other signals

  • AI-augmented workflows
  • rapid experimentation
  • prototyping
  • product scoping
  • ambiguity reduction