Staff Mechanical Engineer

*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.

• Own mechanical design standards and reference architectures for large-scale AI data centers.
• Develop cooling architectures for greenfield, retrofit, and partner-operated facilities.
• Design central plants, heat-rejection systems, hydronic distribution, air-cooling systems, and direct-to-chip liquid-cooling infrastructure.
• Perform cooling-load, heat-transfer, hydraulic, pressure-drop, psychrometric, and equipment-capacity calculations.
• Develop and review P&IDs, equipment schedules, layouts, specifications, sequences of operation, and basis-of-design documents.
• Select and size chillers, cooling towers, dry coolers, pumps, heat exchangers, CRAHs, CDUs, piping, valves, and water-treatment systems.
• Evaluate designs for capacity, redundancy, failure isolation, maintainability, efficiency, water use, constructability, cost, and schedule.
• Translate GPU, rack, and cluster thermal requirements into facility cooling requirements.
• Review partner designs, vendor submittals, construction documents, and equipment packages for compliance with Lambda standards.
• Coordinate mechanical interfaces with electrical systems, controls, building structure, hardware engineering, construction, commissioning, and operations.
• Support equipment selection, long-lead procurement, factory testing, construction sequencing, commissioning, and system bring-up.
• Investigate cooling failures and operational risks, driving lessons back into future designs.
• Travel to project sites, manufacturers, and partner facilities as needed.
• Have experience designing mechanical systems for data centers, mission-critical facilities, central plants, or large industrial environments.
• Understand hydronic systems, heat transfer, chilled-water systems, heat rejection, pumping, filtration, and water treatment.
• Can develop and review P&IDs, mechanical layouts, equipment schedules, technical specifications, and engineering calculations.
• Understand mechanical redundancy, failure domains, maintainability, and operational requirements.
• Can evaluate system performance across changing weather conditions and compute loads.
• Understand applicable mechanical, plumbing, energy, and safety codes and standards.
• Can balance cooling performance, efficiency, water consumption, reliability, cost, and delivery schedule.
• Communicate clearly across engineering, construction, operations, vendors, and executive stakeholders.
• Hold a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering or equivalent practical experience.
• 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.

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