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Fluidstack is building civilization-scale infrastructure for AI, acquiring power, designing and operating data centers at gigawatt scale. The Power Generation team is solving unprecedented challenges: building islanded grids at gigawatt scale from scratch, getting power online in months rather than years, creating repeatable power blocks that can be deployed across a fleet, and designing grids where compute load actively participates in grid stability.
As Microgrid Architect Lead, you will own the complete system design basis for islanded grids, including voltage levels, topology, grounding, redundancy boundaries, and repeatable block/cluster units. Your responsibilities span:
- Establishing the system design basis and issuing v1 single-line diagrams within six months
- Treating the power block as a product, maintaining one standard design across sites and driving out bespoke variation
- Writing the internal grid code that all generators, battery energy storage systems (BESS), inverters, transformers, and interconnection transformers must meet; owning conformance evidence before equipment ships
- Building and owning the model of record, producing generation/BESS sizing, load flow, short circuit, and transient stability studies; accepting or rejecting all vendor and EPC studies against this baseline
- Setting stability and protection philosophy, including loss-of-largest-unit contingency response, reserve policy, and load shedding schemes with compute as a participating resource
- Owning the phasing rule for safe block energization at every build state and prioritizing the study roadmap
- Closing the loop from field operations back into design standards, visiting sites to ensure designs are built and operated as intended
- Hiring and mentoring specialists: protection/HV substation engineers, studies/EMT engineers, and operations counterparts
You will operate with full autonomy, owning scope end-to-end, reasoning from first principles, and moving with insane urgency to push the frontier forward.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Delivered a real islanded or very weak-grid power system at 100MW or more (island, remote utility, mining/LNG captive plant, OEM power systems group, or specialist islanded-systems practice); grid-tied microgrids do not qualify
- Built models with your own hands: deep EMT work in PSCAD or equivalent alongside RMS; personally produced load flow, short circuit, and stability results that drove decisions
- Designed around grid-forming inverter control and inverter-dominated protection with minimal synchronous machine backup
- Personally owned a system design basis that vendors were held to; rejected vendor or EPC studies that did not meet it
- Been present when an island went dark and explained why
- Set standards that OEMs and EPCs (GE, Caterpillar, Tesla equivalents) actually comply with based on technical authority
- Designed something built many times over; demonstrated discipline in freezing designs, saying no to late changes, and understanding supply chain impact
- Spend time where work happens; shape standards based on what installers and operators actually do
BONUS QUALIFICATIONS:
- ERCOT market and interconnection dynamics
- GW-scale HV substation design (230kV and above)
- Professional Engineer license
- Toyota Production System or lean practice applied to design and build
- Load shedding and dispatch schemes treating flexible load as participating resource
- Utility control room and switching order design
