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Lambda is building the superintelligence cloud, serving tens of thousands of customers from AI researchers to enterprises and hyperscalers. As a Staff Mechanical Engineer, you will own mechanical design standards and reference architectures for large-scale AI data centers, establishing best practices that scale across the organization.
You will develop comprehensive cooling architectures for greenfield, retrofit, and partner-operated facilities, including central plants, heat-rejection systems, hydronic distribution, air-cooling systems, and direct-to-chip liquid-cooling infrastructure. Your work will involve performing detailed cooling-load, heat-transfer, hydraulic, pressure-drop, psychrometric, and equipment-capacity calculations to ensure optimal performance.
Key responsibilities include developing and reviewing P&IDs, equipment schedules, layouts, specifications, sequences of operation, and basis-of-design documents. You will select and size critical components such as chillers, cooling towers, dry coolers, pumps, heat exchangers, CRAHs, CDUs, piping, valves, and water-treatment systems. You'll evaluate designs holistically across capacity, redundancy, failure isolation, maintainability, efficiency, water use, constructability, cost, and schedule.
You will translate GPU, rack, and cluster thermal requirements into facility-level cooling requirements and review partner designs, vendor submittals, and construction documents for compliance with Lambda standards. Cross-functional coordination with electrical systems, controls, building structure, hardware engineering, construction, commissioning, and operations teams is essential. You will support equipment selection, long-lead procurement, factory testing, construction sequencing, commissioning, and system bring-up, and investigate cooling failures to drive lessons into future designs. Travel to project sites, manufacturers, and partner facilities is expected.
The role requires presence in the San Francisco or San Jose office 4 days per week, with Tuesday designated as the work-from-home day.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Experience designing mechanical systems for data centers, mission-critical facilities, central plants, or large industrial environments
- Strong understanding of hydronic systems, heat transfer, chilled-water systems, heat rejection, pumping, filtration, and water treatment
- Ability to develop and review P&IDs, mechanical layouts, equipment schedules, technical specifications, and engineering calculations
- Understanding of mechanical redundancy, failure domains, maintainability, and operational requirements
- Ability to evaluate system performance across changing weather conditions and compute loads
- Knowledge of applicable mechanical, plumbing, energy, and safety codes and standards
- Ability to balance cooling performance, efficiency, water consumption, reliability, cost, and delivery schedule
- Clear communication skills across engineering, construction, operations, vendors, and executive stakeholders
- Bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering or equivalent practical experience
NICE TO HAVE:
- Experience designing hyperscale, colocation, HPC, or AI data centers
- Experience with high-density GPU infrastructure and direct-to-chip liquid cooling
- Experience with CDUs, warm-water cooling, dry coolers, adiabatic systems, or water-side economization
- Familiarity with CFD, Pipe-Flo, AFT Fathom, Revit, or comparable engineering tools
- Experience with water chemistry, glycol systems, filtration, flushing, and cooling-system cleanliness requirements
- Experience supporting factory testing, commissioning, integrated systems testing, or failure investigations
- Professional Engineer licensure or progress toward licensure
