Senior Manager, Data Center Operations

Senior Manager, Data Center Operations Crusoe is on a mission to accelerate the abundance of energy and intelligence. As the only vertically integrated AI infrastructure company built from the ground up, we own and operate each layer of the stack — from electrons to tokens — to power the world's most ambitious AI workloads. When you join Crusoe, you join a team that is building the future, faster. We're in the midst of the greatest industrial revolution of our time. The demand for AI compute is boundless, and power is a bottleneck. We're solving that — with an energy-first approach that makes AI infrastructure better for the world and faster for the people innovating with AI. We're looking for problem-solving, opportunity-finding teammates with a sense of urgency, who believe in the scale of our ambition and thrive on a path not fully paved — people who want to grow their careers alongside a team of experts across energy, manufacturing, data center construction, and cloud services. If you want to do the most meaningful work of your career, help our customers and partners advance their AI strategies, and be part of a high-performing team that believes in each other, come build with us at Crusoe. About the Role: As the Senior Manager of Data Center Operations for our Houston site, you will be the tactical lead for both our high-performance production and AI lab environments. This is a hands-on leadership role focused on the "white space"; specifically hardware lifecycle management, break-fix operations, and lab scalability. While you will coordinate with the facility landlord regarding security, site safety, power, and cooling; your primary role is ensuring our AI hardware is racked, stacked, and running at peak performance. What You'll Be Working On: - Hardware Lifecycle & Break-Fix: Lead the day-to-day maintenance of our AI-optimized hardware. Oversee rapid diagnostics, component replacement (GPU trays, DIMM’s, and hard drives), and RMA processes. - Lab to Production: Drive the physical installation and cabling of new lab servers, storage, and network devices. Develop documentation that can be used by data center operations technicians at other locations as hardware transitions from the lab into production. - Landlord & Vendor Relations: Act as the primary on-site liaison with the facility landlord. Monitor their delivery of critical utilities (power/cooling) and hold them accountable to SLAs within our leased space. - Team Leadership: Build and mentor a lean, high-performing team of hardware technicians. Foster a culture of precision, especially regarding hardware repair management and asset tracking. - Operational Excellence: Maintain a "gold standard" white space environment. Develop and refine SOPs for hardware deployments, firmware updates, and physical security audits. - Inventory & Logistics: Manage on-site spare parts inventory and coordinate high-value logistics (shipping/receiving) of specialized AI compute nodes. - Smart Hands Support: Provide "eyes and ears" for remote engineering teams, executing complex physical interventions to minimize downtime. What You'll Bring to the Team: - Proven Leadership: 7+ years in data center operations, with specific experience managing white space or lab environments. - Hardware Expertise: Deep, hands-on experience with enterprise-grade server architecture (GPU-heavy clusters are a significant plus). - The "Tenant" Mindset: Experience operating in a colocation or leased-space environment; you know how to manage a landlord to get what your team needs. - Tactical Execution: You are as comfortable in providing updates to senior leadership as you are on the floor with a crash cart and a label maker. - Communication: Ability to translate hardware health and lab constraints into clear updates for cross-functional stakeholders. - Safety & Compliance: Knowledge of rack-level safety and compliance standards (ISO, OSHA). - Reliability: Willingness to be hands-on and ava ... (truncated, view full listing at source)