Staff Mechanical Engineer - Data Center Cooling

Note: This position requires presence in our San Francisco or San Jose office location 4 days per week; Lambda’s designated work from home day is currently Tuesday.

What You’ll 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 for greenfield, retrofit, and partner-operated facilities.
• 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.
• Review partner designs, vendor submittals, equipment selections, and construction documents for compliance with Lambda standards.
• Coordinate cooling interfaces across hardware engineering, electrical engineering, controls, construction, commissioning, and operations.
• Support equipment testing, construction sequencing, commissioning, cooling-system bring-up, and initial GPU loading.
• Investigate thermal events and cooling failures, incorporating lessons into future designs and operating standards.
• Travel to project sites, manufacturers, and partner facilities as needed.

You

• Have 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.
• Have 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.
• Hold 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.

Salary Range Information

The annual salary range for this position has been set based on market data and other factors. However, a salary higher or lower than this range may be appropriate for a candidate whose qualifications differ meaningfully from those listed in the job description.