Principal Data Center Operations and Maintenance Engineer

Designworks Talent LLC; Bellevue (WA); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

401(k) plan with company match

Paid holidays

Job summary

Designworks Talent LLC is seeking Principal Operations & Maintenance Engineer in Bellevue, WA, offering a hybrid role in a next-generation AI infrastructure setting. Build and scale the Operations & Maintenance function, focusing on reliability and customer experience for mission-critical AI workloads.

You will partner with Engineering, Infrastructure, Networking, Hardware, and Operations leadership to shape tooling, processes, and runbooks as the platform grows.

Qualifications

• Experience in data center operations, site reliability, or infrastructure operations roles.
• Strong incident response and troubleshooting skills across hardware, networking, and systems layers.
• Comfortable in an early-stage environment where processes and tooling are still being established.
• Experience in multiple technical environments is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Monitor live data center and GPU infrastructure for performance, capacity, and reliability issues.
• Lead or support incident response for production issues, driving fast, effective resolution.
• Collaborate with engineering to ensure monitoring, alerting, and tooling are first class and issues are caught before impacting customers.
• Partner with hardware, networking, orchestration, and infra teams to resolve root causes and prevent recurrence.
• Contribute to runbooks, on-call practices, and operational maturity as the platform scales.

Skills

Data center operations

Site reliability

Infrastructure operations

GPU / large-scale compute experience

Incident response

Troubleshooting

Early-stage adaptability

Tools

PagerDuty

Opsgenie

Prometheus

Grafana

Datadog

Job description

Principal Operations & Maintenance Engineer

Location: Hybrid | Bellevue, WA (downtown)Titles: Senior, Staff and Principal (multiple roles available)

Support Operations & Maintenance for a Next-Generation AI Infrastructure Firm

About the Opportunity

A well-funded, rapidly growing AI infrastructure company is building a next-generation cloud platform designed to power the full lifecycle of artificial intelligence. The organization is developing a comprehensive AI infrastructure, platform, and services portfolio that supports the full spectrum of AI workloads—including large-scale compute, model training, fine-tuning, inference, and emerging agentic AI applications.

Backed by significant long-term investment, the company combines the speed, ownership, and innovation of a startup with the stability and resources of an established parent organization. Engineering teams are intentionally lean, highly collaborative, and AI-native, leveraging automation and modern tooling to operate world-class infrastructure at scale.

As AI data centers come online across North America, the company is building its Operations & Maintenance organization. We're seeking experienced operational team members who have built and scaled production infrastructure organizations and can establish the people, processes, tooling, and operational discipline required to deliver exceptional reliability and customer experience.

The Opportunity

This is an individual contributor role responsible for helping to build and scale the Operations & Maintenance function supporting mission-critical AI infrastructure. The focus of these roles will be to support post-launch monitoring, incident response, reliability and provide exceptional customer support.

You will partner closely with Engineering, Infrastructure, Networking, Hardware, and Operations and Maintenance leadership to create a highly reliable, scalable operating system capable of supporting one of the industry's most advanced AI infrastructure platforms.

What You'll Do

• Monitor live data center and GPU infrastructure for performance, capacity, and reliability issues.

• Lead or support incident response for production issues, driving toward fast, effective resolution.

• Collaborate with the engineering teams to make sure monitoring, alerting, and operational tooling are first class and make issues are caught before they impact customers.

• Partner with hardware, networking, orchestration, and infrastructure teams to resolve root causes and prevent recurrence.

• Contribute to runbooks, on-call practices, and operational maturity as the platform scales.
  

What We're Looking For

• Experience in a data center operations, site reliability, or infrastructure operations role, ideally supporting GPU or large-scale compute environments.

• Strong incident response and troubleshooting skills across hardware, networking, and systems layers.

• Comfortable working in an early-stage environment where processes and tooling are still being established.

• Experience in multiple technical environments is a plus.
  

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with on-call/incident-management tooling (e.g., PagerDuty, Opsgenie) and monitoring stacks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog).

• Background supporting GPU cluster or data center operations post-launch.
  

Compensation

• Competitive base pay for Bellevue market

• Certain roles are eligible for additional rewards, including merit increases, annual bonus, and long term incentives. These awards are allocated based on individual performance

• U.S. based employees have access to medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) plan and company match, employees also receive per calendar year, paid holidays.
  

Location

• Hybrid role based in the Bellevue, WA area.

• Approximately three days per week in the office.

• U.S. work authorization is required. Visa sponsorship is not currently available.
  

Why Join?

• Build the Operations & Maintenance organization, processes, tooling and systems from its earliest stages.

• Influence the strategy, processes, tooling, and culture supporting next-generation AI infrastructure.

• Work alongside experienced engineers and engineering leaders solving some of the industry's most complex infrastructure challenges.

• Join a company combining startup agility with substantial long-term investment and stability.

• Play a foundational role in scaling the infrastructure powering tomorrow's AI applications.