Staff Mechanical Engineer - Data Center Cooling

The role

This person will own cooling-system standards and reference architectures for large-scale AI data centers. They will design thermal paths from GPU and rack heat capture through facility distribution and final heat rejection.

What you will do

• Own cooling-system standards and reference architectures for large-scale AI data centers
• Design the complete thermal path from GPU and rack heat capture through facility distribution and final heat rejection
• Translate server, rack, and cluster requirements into coolant temperature, flow, pressure, water-quality, and facility-capacity requirements
• Develop air-cooled, liquid-cooled, and hybrid cooling architectures
• Design central plants, technology cooling-water loops, CDUs, heat exchangers, pumps, piping, chillers, cooling towers, dry coolers, and adiabatic systems
• Perform thermal, hydraulic, pressure-drop, heat-transfer, psychrometric, and equipment-capacity calculations
• Evaluate system performance across site climate conditions, compute-load changes, equipment failures, and maintenance scenarios
• Develop and review P&IDs, equipment schedules, layouts, specifications, sequence of operation, and basis-of-design documents
• Define requirements for redundancy, thermal ride-through, failure isolation, maintainability, efficiency, and water consumption
• Establish requirements for coolant chemistry, materials compatibility, filtration, flushing, cleanliness, leak detection, and fluid management

Required qualifications

• Experience designing cooling systems for data centers, mission-critical facilities, central plants, or large industrial environments
• Understand 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
• Can develop and review P&IDs, equipment specifications, mechanical layouts, and engineering calculations
• Can model system capacity, flow, pressure loss, temperature approach, and performance across varying operating conditions
• Understand cooling-system redundancy, failure domains, thermal ride-through, maintainability, and operational risk
• Understand the relationship between GPU behavior, rack density, coolant conditions, and facility cooling capacity
• Can balance reliability, efficiency, water consumption, equipment cost, and delivery schedule
• Communicate clearly across engineering, construction, operations, equipment vendors, and executive stakeholders
• 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

Benefits

• Generous cash & equity compensation
• Health, dental, and vision coverage for you and your dependents
• Wellness and commuter stipends for select roles
• 401k Plan with 2% company match (USA employees)
• Flexible paid time off plan

About the company

Lambda is a leader in AI cloud infrastructure serving tens of thousands of customers. Founded in 2012, it has 500+ employees and is growing fast.