Role Overview
The Staff Mechanical Engineer - Data Center Cooling role at Lambda involves directing cooling-system architecture and standards for large-scale artificial intelligence facilities. This position suits an experienced engineering professional based out of the San Francisco office location with regular weekly presence required.
Key Responsibilities
Owns cooling-system standards and reference architectures for large-scale AI data centers.
Designs the complete thermal path from GPU and rack heat capture through facility distribution and final heat rejection.
Translates server, rack, and cluster requirements into coolant temperature, flow, pressure, water-quality, and facility-capacity requirements.
Develops air-cooled, liquid-cooled, and hybrid cooling architectures for greenfield, retrofit, and partner-operated facilities.
Designs central plants, technology cooling-water loops, CDUs, heat exchangers, pumps, piping, chillers, cooling towers, dry coolers, and adiabatic systems.
Performs thermal, hydraulic, pressure-drop, heat-transfer, psychrometric, and equipment-capacity calculations.
Evaluates system performance across site climate conditions, compute-load changes, equipment failures, and maintenance scenarios.
Develops and reviews P&IDs, equipment schedules, layouts, specifications, sequence of operation, and basis-of-design documents.
Defines requirements for redundancy, thermal ride-through, failure isolation, maintainability, efficiency, and water consumption.
Establishes requirements for coolant chemistry, materials compatibility, filtration, flushing, cleanliness, leak detection, and fluid management.
Reviews partner designs, vendor submittals, equipment selections, and construction documents for compliance with organizational standards.
Coordinates cooling interfaces across hardware engineering, electrical engineering, controls, construction, commissioning, and operations.
Supports equipment testing, construction sequencing, commissioning, cooling-system bring-up, and initial GPU loading.
Investigates thermal events and cooling failures, incorporating lessons into future designs and operating standards.
Travels to project sites, manufacturers, and partner facilities as needed.
Requirements
Experience designing cooling systems for data centers, mission-critical facilities, central plants, or large industrial environments.
Understanding of hydronic design, heat transfer, pumping, heat exchangers, chilled-water systems, and heat-rejection equipment.
Experience with direct-to-chip liquid cooling, CDUs, technology cooling-water loops, or other high-density cooling systems.
Ability to develop and review P&IDs, equipment specifications, mechanical layouts, and engineering calculations.
Ability to model system capacity, flow, pressure loss, temperature approach, and performance across varying operating conditions.
Understanding of cooling-system redundancy, failure domains, thermal ride-through, maintainability, and operational risk.
Understanding of the relationship between GPU behavior, rack density, coolant conditions, and facility cooling capacity.
Ability to balance reliability, efficiency, water consumption, equipment cost, and delivery schedule.
Strong communication skills across engineering, construction, operations, equipment vendors, and executive stakeholders.
Holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering or equivalent practical experience.
Nice to Have
Experience designing cooling for hyperscale, colocation, HPC, or AI data centers.
Experience supporting multi-megawatt liquid-cooled GPU deployments.
Experience with warm-water cooling, water-side economization, dry coolers, or adiabatic heat rejection.
Familiarity with CFD, Pipe-Flo, AFT Fathom, Revit, or comparable engineering tools.
Knowledge of coolant chemistry, glycol systems, corrosion control, filtration, and wetted-material compatibility.
Familiarity with ASHRAE TC 9.9 guidance and liquid-cooling industry standards.
Experience with factory testing, commissioning, integrated systems testing, or live system bring-up.
Professional Engineer licensure or progress toward licensure.
Skills and Tools
Mechanical engineering principles, hydronic design, and heat transfer.
Thermal, hydraulic, pressure-drop, and psychrometric calculations.
P&ID development, equipment specification, and mechanical layout design.
Direct-to-chip liquid cooling, CDU implementation, and central plant configuration.
Optional tools include CFD, Pipe-Flo, AFT Fathom, and Revit.
Salary and Benefits
Annual salary range of $349,000 to $465,000 USD per year.
Generous cash and equity compensation packages.
Health, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents.
Wellness and commuter stipends for select roles.
401(k) plan with a 2 percent company match for USA employees.
Flexible paid time off plan.
About the Company
Founded in 2012, Lambda operates with over 500 employees and experiences rapid growth. Backed by numerous prominent investors and industry partners, the organization delivers superintelligence cloud infrastructure to thousands of customers ranging from AI researchers to major enterprises. Research papers from the team appear at top machine learning and graphics conferences including NeurIPS, ICCV, SIGGRAPH, and TOG.
How to Apply
Interested candidates should visit the official company careers page to apply for this position.
