Staff Mechanical Engineer - Data Center Cooling

Socket.dev; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Cash & equity compensation

401k with company match

Health, dental, vision coverage

Wellness stipend

Job summary

Lambda, The Superintelligence Cloud, is a leader in AI cloud infrastructure serving tens of thousands of customers. Join us to build the world's best AI data-center cooling solutions from central plants to adiabatic systems.

This hybrid role requires presence in our San Francisco or San Jose office four days per week, with Tuesday as the designated work-from-home day. You will design cooling architectures and review design documentation across teams.

Qualifications

• Experience designing cooling systems for data centers or mission-critical facilities.
• Understanding of hydronic design, heat transfer, pumping, and heat rejection equipment.
• Experience with direct-to-chip liquid cooling and technology cooling-water loops.

Responsibilities

• Own cooling-system standards and reference architectures for large-scale AI data centers.
• Design the complete thermal path from heat capture to final rejection.
• Develop cooling architectures for greenfield, retrofit, and partner-operated facilities.
• Review P&IDs, equipment schedules, layouts, and sequences of operation.
• Coordinate cooling interfaces across hardware, electrical, controls, and operations.

Skills

Cooling-system design

Hydronic design

Thermal analysis

P&ID review

Cross-functional communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering

Tools

CFD

Pipe-Flo

AFT Fathom

Revit

Job description

Lambda, The Superintelligence Cloud, is a leader in AI cloud infrastructure serving tens of thousands of customers. Our customers range from AI researchers to enterprises and hyperscalers. Lambda's mission is to make compute as ubiquitous as electricity and give everyone the power of superintelligence. One person, one GPU.

If you'd like to build the world's best AI cloud, join us.

*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.

What You’ll Do

• Own cooling-system standards and reference architectures for large-scale AI data centers.
• Design the complete thermal path from GPU and rack heat capture through facility distribution and final heat rejection.
• Translate server, rack, and cluster requirements into coolant temperature, flow, pressure, water-quality, and facility-capacity requirements.
• 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.

You

• Have experience designing cooling systems for data centers, mission-critical facilities, central plants, or large industrial environments.
• Understand hydronic design, heat transfer, pumping, heat exchangers, chilled-water systems, and heat-rejection equipment.
• Have experience with direct-to-chip liquid cooling, CDUs, technology cooling-water loops, or other high-density cooling systems.
• Can develop and review P&IDs, equipment specifications, mechanical layouts, and engineering calculations.
• Can model system capacity, flow, pressure loss, temperature approach, and performance across varying operating conditions.
• Understand cooling-system redundancy, failure domains, thermal ride-through, maintainability, and operational risk.
• Understand the relationship between GPU behavior, rack density, coolant conditions, and facility cooling capacity.
• Can balance reliability, efficiency, water consumption, equipment cost, and delivery schedule.
• Communicate clearly across engineering, construction, operations, equipment vendors, and executive stakeholders.
• Hold a 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.

Salary Range Information

The annual salary range for this position has been set based on market data and other factors. However, a salary higher or lower than this range may be appropriate for a candidate whose qualifications differ meaningfully from those listed in the job description.

About Lambda

• Founded in 2012, with 500+ employees, and growing fast.
• Our investors notably include TWG Global, US Innovative Technology Fund (USIT), Andra Capital, SGW, Andrej Karpathy, ARK Invest, Fincadia Advisors, G Squared, In‑Q‑Tel (IQT), KHK & Partners, NVIDIA, Pegatron, Supermicro, Wistron, Wiwynn, Gradient Ventures, Mercato Partners, SVB, 1517, and Crescent Cove.
• We have research papers accepted at top machine learning and graphics conferences, including NeurIPS, ICCV, SIGGRAPH, and TOG.
• Our values are publicly available: https://lambda.ai/careers.
• We offer generous cash & equity compensation.
• Health, dental, and vision coverage for you and your dependents.
• Wellness and commuter stipends for select roles.
• 401k Plan with 2% company match (USA employees).
• Flexible paid time off plan that we all actually use.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Lambda is an Equal Opportunity employer. Applicants are considered without regard to race, color, religion, creed, national origin, age, sex, gender, marital status, sexual orientation and identity, genetic information, veteran status, citizenship, or any other factors prohibited by local, state, or federal law.