Staff Product Manager, Orchestration

Crusoe · Data AI · San Francisco, CA - US · Product and Design

Staff Product Manager for Orchestration at Crusoe, an AI infrastructure company. The role focuses on defining and owning the foundational orchestration services for large-scale AI workloads (training, fine-tuning, inference) on their AI cloud. This involves managing Kubernetes offerings and underlying infrastructure, balancing reliability, scale, and platform implications, and driving product lifecycle end-to-end. Requires deep technical fluency in orchestration systems and cloud infrastructure, with a strong product management background.

What you'd actually do

  1. Define and own the multi-team roadmap for our foundational orchestration services. Identify opportunities in ambiguous problem spaces, set long-term strategic direction, and build consensus across engineering leads and senior stakeholders.
  2. Drive requirements for the orchestration layers hosting Crusoe's mission-critical services, balancing reliability, scale, and long-term platform implications—including second- and third-order effects of key architectural decisions.
  3. Engage regularly with current and prospective customers to surface unmet needs, synthesize feedback across the portfolio, and translate insights into concrete product investments with clear ROI.
  4. Lead ruthless prioritization and navigate complex trade-offs (e.g., latency vs. cost, speed vs. reliability) across multiple workstreams in close collaboration with Engineering, SRE, and Customer Success.
  5. Build and maintain alignment with tech leads, senior managers, and business stakeholders across multiple teams. Drive initiative with urgency, resolve cross-functional friction, and ensure execution stays true to strategic intent.

Skills

Required

  • Kubernetes or comparable orchestration systems
  • Cloud infrastructure
  • Virtualization
  • Hardware-software interface
  • Technical product management or product-minded engineering experience (7+ years)
  • First-principles thinking
  • High agency
  • Cross-functional influence
  • Collaborative backbone

Nice to have

  • AI/ML familiarity (training and inference workloads)
  • HPC expertise
  • Specialized schedulers (Slurm, Volcano)
  • Active AI tinkerer (local LLMs, agents)

What the JD emphasized

  • deep functional expertise
  • drive complex, cross-functional product initiatives with minimal direction
  • own the product lifecycle end-to-end
  • identifying ambiguous, ill-defined problems
  • build alignment across engineering, SRE, and business stakeholders
  • roadmap that directly contributes to Crusoe's revenue and competitive differentiation
  • oversee our Managed Kubernetes offerings and the underlying infrastructure clusters
  • serving as the connective tissue between the hardware layer and the user-facing software experience
  • Define and own the multi-team roadmap
  • Identify opportunities in ambiguous problem spaces
  • set long-term strategic direction
  • build consensus across engineering leads and senior stakeholders
  • Drive requirements for the orchestration layers hosting Crusoe's mission-critical services
  • balancing reliability, scale, and long-term platform implications
  • second- and third-order effects of key architectural decisions
  • Engage regularly with current and prospective customers
  • surface unmet needs
  • synthesize feedback across the portfolio
  • translate insights into concrete product investments with clear ROI
  • Lead ruthless prioritization
  • navigate complex trade-offs
  • across multiple workstreams
  • in close collaboration with Engineering, SRE, and Customer Success
  • Build and maintain alignment with tech leads, senior managers, and business stakeholders across multiple teams
  • Drive initiative with urgency
  • resolve cross-functional friction
  • ensure execution stays true to strategic intent
  • Deep, hands-on experience with Kubernetes or comparable orchestration systems
  • strong understanding of cloud infrastructure, virtualization, and the hardware-software interface
  • engage credibly at the "metal" layer
  • 7+ years of technical product management or product-minded engineering experience
  • track record of owning complex, ambiguous product areas independently
  • delivering measurable business impact
  • reject "industry standards" in favor of logic-based frameworks
  • understand the "physics" of infrastructure
  • unlock differentiated product decisions
  • don't wait for permission or a fully defined problem statement
  • identify gaps in the orchestration layer
  • form a point of view
  • drive toward resolution
  • bringing others along with you
  • proven ability to build consensus with engineering leads and senior managers
  • align multiple teams around a product direction
  • develop the product instincts of colleagues around you
  • balance deep stakeholder empathy with the conviction to say "no"
  • articulate why clearly

Other signals

  • AI infrastructure
  • AI compute
  • training, fine-tuning, and inference workloads
  • Kubernetes
  • cloud infrastructure