Cooling Systems Engineer (AI Data Centers)

Location: Hybrid, with presence required in the San Francisco or San Jose office 4 days per week; designated work-from-home day is Tuesday. Travel to project sites, manufacturers, and partner facilities may be required.

Salary: $349,000–$465,000 annual salary.

Company

Lambda develops AI cloud infrastructure for researchers, enterprises, and hyperscalers.

What you will do

• Own cooling-system standards and reference architectures for large-scale AI data centers.
• Design thermal paths from GPU and rack heat capture through facility distribution and final heat rejection.
• Develop air-cooled, liquid-cooled, and hybrid architectures for greenfield, retrofit, and partner-operated facilities.
• Design and evaluate central plants, cooling-water loops, CDUs, heat exchangers, pumps, chillers, cooling towers, dry coolers, and adiabatic systems.
• Produce and review P&IDs, equipment schedules, layouts, specifications, operating sequences, and basis-of-design documents.
• Coordinate with hardware, electrical, controls, construction, commissioning, operations, vendors, and partners through testing, bring-up, and initial GPU loading.

Requirements

• Experience designing cooling systems for data centers, mission-critical facilities, central plants, or large industrial environments.
• Strong understanding of hydronic design, heat transfer, pumping, heat exchangers, chilled-water systems, and heat-rejection equipment.
• Experience with direct-to-chip liquid cooling, CDUs, technology cooling-water loops, or comparable high-density cooling systems.
• Ability to perform thermal, hydraulic, pressure-drop, heat-transfer, psychrometric, and equipment-capacity calculations.
• Understanding of redundancy, failure domains, thermal ride-through, maintainability, operational risk, GPU behavior, rack density, and facility cooling capacity.
• Bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering or equivalent practical experience.

Nice to have

• Experience with hyperscale, colocation, HPC, or AI data centers and 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, ASHRAE TC 9.9, and liquid-cooling standards.
• Knowledge of coolant chemistry, glycol systems, corrosion control, filtration, and wetted-material compatibility.
• Professional Engineer licensure or progress toward licensure, plus experience with factory testing and commissioning.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work arrangement with one designated work-from-home day per week.
• Cash and equity compensation.
• Health, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents.
• Wellness and commuter stipends for select roles.
• 401(k) plan with a 2% company match for US employees.
• Flexible paid time off.