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Lambda, a leader in AI cloud infrastructure, is seeking a Staff Mechanical Engineer to own cooling-system standards and reference architectures for large-scale AI data centers. This is a company-wide technical leadership role focused on designing and optimizing thermal solutions that support Lambda's mission to make compute as ubiquitous as electricity.
You will own the complete thermal path from GPU and rack heat capture through facility distribution and final heat rejection. Key responsibilities include:
- 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
This 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 cooling systems for data centers, mission-critical facilities, central plants, or large industrial environments
- Strong understanding of 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
- Ability to develop and review P&IDs, equipment specifications, mechanical layouts, and engineering calculations
- Ability to model system capacity, flow, pressure loss, temperature approach, and performance across varying operating conditions
- Understanding of cooling-system redundancy, failure domains, thermal ride-through, maintainability, and operational risk
- Understanding of the relationship between GPU behavior, rack density, coolant conditions, and facility cooling capacity
- Ability to balance reliability, efficiency, water consumption, equipment cost, and delivery schedule
- Strong communication skills 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
