Controls Engineer, Energy Management

Fluidstack•Austin, TX

3d•$200,000 - $250,000

About The Position

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. The role involves owning the control and data contract between our facility energy controller and third-party power plant controllers, defining objects, fields, units, update rates, and staleness behavior. It also includes defining sequences of operation, specifying point maps, interlocks, and constraint classes, and translating between electrical and software domains. The engineer will prove the interface in simulation before energization and carry that work into automated commissioning.

Requirements

Worked in the protocols that move data between machines and between systems (MQTT, OPC UA, REST APIs) and can say why one would be picked over another for a given job.
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.
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.
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. Held both sides to it.
Written the control narrative for a system where two controllers had to agree, and owned what happened when they disagreed.
Sit between the controls world and the software world and be fluent in both. Taken a control requirement from an electrical engineer and turned it into something a software team could actually build, and pushed back on a software design because it would not survive the field.
Pushed back on a vendor's scope, or on your own company's assumption, with a number rather than an opinion.

Nice To Haves

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.

Responsibilities

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.