Automation & Controls Engineer, Data Center Facilities

The role

You will design, program, commission, and own the controls for data center facility plants such as chillers, pumps, cooling towers, and coolant distribution units. You will write PLC code, build operator interfaces, and take ownership of live systems while the cluster is in production.

What you will do

• Design and manage facility automation projects from sequence of operations through panel build, checkout, commissioning, failover testing and handoff to operations.
• Write, debug and document PLC and controller code for chillers, pumps, cooling towers, coolant distribution units, air handlers and heat rejection equipment.
• Implement lead/lag, staging, rotation, free-cooling and liquid-cooling control strategies that hold capacity, efficiency and redundancy (N+1 / 2N).
• Keep the plant safe with fail-safe interlocks, emergency power off and transfer logic, and an alarm philosophy meeting NEC, NFPA 70E, NFPA 75 and life-safety requirements.
• Build HMI and control-room graphics so operators can see plant state, acknowledge alarms, trend equipment health and troubleshoot.
• Integrate equipment controllers into the site BMS, EPMS and historian.
• Design control panels and electrical interfaces compliant with NEC, NFPA and UL 508A.
• Own systems after go-live, including alarm rationalization, loop tuning, sequence changes, outage support and uptime improvement.
• Build schedules and punch lists for controls scope and drive vendors, contractors and internal teams during construction and live expansions.

Required qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, controls, mechatronics or a related engineering discipline.
• 1+ years of experience in industrial controls, building or plant automation, data center facilities, or related programming (internship and extracurricular experience applies).
• Willingness to work on site in the data center for checkout and troubleshooting.
• Ability to work long hours, nights and weekends when required.

Nice to have

• Experience in data centers, power generation, district energy, industrial utilities or other 24/7 process plants.
• PLC programming in structured text and ladder (Rockwell Studio 5000, Siemens TIA Portal or Beckhoff TwinCAT preferred).
• HMI, BMS and SCADA development (Ignition, Niagara or equivalent).
• Fieldbus and Ethernet plant networking: BACnet/IP, Modbus TCP, OPC UA, MQTT, SNMP, EtherNet/IP, Profinet.
• Design of fail-safe circuits using safety relays and safety controllers.
• Reading and producing schematics and one-line diagrams (EPLAN preferred).
• Sizing of motors, VFDs, valves, actuators and instrumentation.
• Experience with EPMS, power metering, generator or ATS status and historian tools.

Before you apply

• Work on site in the data center, including mechanical plants, electrical rooms and data halls.

About the company

SpaceXSI is building Super Intelligence, including the Colossus supercomputers and Grok models and applications. The company is an equal opportunity employer.