Controls Engineer, Energy Management

RiseMe; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Fluidstack seeks a Facility Controls Engineer to join our Austin-area team, focusing on real-time load control, MEP, and behind-the-meter integration in our data centers. You will translate electrical constraints into software requirements and drive end-to-end control narratives.

You will define operation sequences, verify interfaces in simulation, and push for Level 4/5 commissioning while collaborating with a cross-disciplinary team.

Qualifications

• Experience translating electrical constraints into software requirements.
• Ability to prototype integrations in Python or Go.
• Familiarity with data contracts and interlocks.
• Understanding of real-time control in data-center environments.

Responsibilities

• Own the control and data contract between facility energy controller and third-party plant controllers.
• Define sequences of operation for normal and fault conditions.
• Specify point maps, interlocks and constraint classes for vendors.
• Translate electrical constraints for software teams and review implementations.
• Prove interfaces in simulation before energization and support automated commissioning.

Skills

Python

Go

Electrical systems basics

Control theory concepts

Tools

MQTT

OPC UA

REST APIs

Job description

About Fluidstack

We exist to make humanity more free. For most of human history, you farmed or you starved. Technology gave people more time for the things they wanted to do, instead of things they had to do. Powerful AI will be the biggest lever for human choice we've ever built - but only if models are aligned with what humanity actually wants. There are groups building AI who don't share these goals. Whoever deploys frontier compute infrastructure fastest will decide whether AI expands human freedom or shrinks it.

We're singularly focused on delivering 10 to 100s of GWs of compute faster than anyone else, rethinking every layer of the stack. We acquire power, design and build data centers, and operate them - with teams spanning hardware and software. Speed and scale are our key differentiators. Come be a part of building civilization-scale infrastructure for AI.

We hire people who care deeply about this problem space. If that is you, please apply!

How We Operate

• Be a barrel. Full autonomy. Own things end to end, take on scope without being asked, no permission required to operate outside your core role.

• Insane urgency. We drive everything forward as fast as possible.

• Reason from first principles. Challenge every assumption. Zero analogy thinking, no egos, the best idea wins.

• Love of the game. The frontier of AI is the most interesting problem of our time. We put in long hours at high intensity to push the frontier forward.

• Build something that actually matters. If you're going to spend your time, spend it on something that matters to the world.

The Facility Controls Team

The Facility Controls team builds the control systems behind Fluidstack's data centers: real-time load control, MEP and behind-the-meter integration, automated commissioning, and autonomous deployment.

Examples of key problems the team is working on

• Deliver the controls behind gigawatt-scale data centers this decade.

• Own real-time load control and MEP and behind-the-meter integration.

• Automate Level 4 and Level 5 commissioning.

• Drive autonomous, robotic deployment.

Role Scope

• Own the control and data contract between our facility energy controller and third-party power plant controllers. Define the objects, fields, units, update rates and staleness behavior that cross the boundary in each direction.

• Define the sequences of operation our controller executes. Normal operation, generation shortfall, source transitions, blackstart and emergency shed, along with the degradation behavior for each.

• Specify the point maps, interlocks and constraint classes that vendors build against. Then hold them to it through factory and site acceptance.

• Translate between electrical and software. Turn electrical and generation constraints into requirements our software team can build, and turn software and data constraints back into terms a plant vendor and an engineer of record will accept.

• Prove the interface in simulation before energization. Every constraint class and every mode transition, then carry that work into automated commissioning

What We're Looking For

The below is a starting point. We always make space for exceptional people, so if you don't fit this role exactly, tell us where you would.

• You have worked in the protocols that move data between machines and between systems (MQTT, OPC UA, REST APIs) and you can say why you would pick one over another for a given job rather than reaching for whichever one you used last.

• You write and read code in at least one language well enough to prototype an integration, test a point map against a live device, and review what the software team ships. Python or Go preferred.

• You read a one-line and a panel schedule and can say what the protection, the breakers and the sources will actually do under a fault.

• You have designed a data contract between two systems: the objects, the fields, the units, the update rates, and what a consumer does when a value goes stale. You held both sides to it.

• You have written the control narrative for a system where two controllers had to agree, and you owned what happened when they disagreed.

• You sit between the controls world and the software world and you are fluent in both. You have taken a control requirement from an electrical engineer and turned it into something a software team could actually build, and you have pushed back on a software design because it would not survive the field.

• You have pushed back on a vendor's scope, or on your own company's assumption, with a number rather than an opinion.

• Bonus: Microgrid and behind-the-meter control (grid-forming BESS, PV plant controllers, turbine and genset dispatch). Utility and industrial protocols (DNP3, IEC 61850 GOOSE, IEC 60870-5-104, Modbus TCP). Schema-driven contracts (OpenAPI, JSON Schema). Automated Level 4 and Level 5 commissioning.

We are committed to pay equity and transparency.

Fluidstack is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability and protected veterans' status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

Fluidstack will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records pursuant to applicable law.