Staff Mechanical Engineer – Data Center Cooling

Lambda; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 349,000 - 465,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, and vision coverage

Wellness stipend

Commuter stipend

401k with 2% match

Flexible paid time off

Job summary

Lambda is seeking a Mechanical Engineer specialized in cooling design for large-scale AI data centers. You will own mechanical design standards, develop cooling architectures for greenfield and retrofit projects, and design central plants and direct-to-chip liquid cooling systems.

You’ll perform complex thermal calculations and review P&IDs and equipment specifications. You will collaborate across electrical, controls, and construction teams, ensure compliance with Lambda standards, and travel

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering or equivalent practical experience.
• 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.
• Understand mechanical redundancy, failure domains, maintainability, and operational requirements.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Skills

Data center cooling design

Hydronic systems

Thermal load calculations

P&IDs review

Engineering calculations

Cross-functional communication

Mechanical redundancy analysis

Systems commissioning

Education

Bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering

Tools

CFD

Pipe-Flo

AFT Fathom

Revit

Job description

Lambda is seeking a Mechanical Engineer specialized in cooling design for large-scale AI data centers. You will own mechanical design standards, develop cooling architectures for greenfield and retrofit projects, and design central plants and direct-to-chip liquid cooling systems.

You’ll perform complex thermal calculations and review P&IDs and equipment specifications. You will collaborate across electrical, controls, and construction teams, ensure compliance with Lambda standards, and travel