Lead Mechanical Engineer, Deployment Engineering

Fluidstack•Austin, TX

3d•$300,000 - $340,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Fluidstack is building civilization-scale infrastructure for AI, aiming to deploy 10 to 100s of GWs of compute faster than anyone else. This involves rethinking every layer of the stack, from acquiring power to designing, building, and operating data centers. The company operates with a philosophy of extreme ownership, velocity, first principles, and a deep passion for the problem space. The Deployment Engineering Team is crucial in turning designs into operational infrastructure, closing the gap between engineering and operations, improving deployment efficiency, and ensuring reliable infrastructure from day one. This role is central to ensuring that AI compute workloads run reliably on the infrastructure built by Fluidstack.

Requirements

Hold a bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering or a related field.
Owned field deployment and commissioning of mechanical systems on data centers or high-density mission-critical facilities.
Commissioned and troubleshot cooling systems (chilled water, CDUs, or direct liquid cooling) on live or commissioning-phase infrastructure.
Built commissioning standards, acceptance test procedures, and maintenance runbooks that hold up at a portfolio level.
Diagnosed and resolved mechanical failures and thermal performance issues on live infrastructure under time pressure.
Mentored mechanical engineers in the field and built their ability to commission independently.
Can travel to deployment and operations sites up to 50 percent of the time.

Nice To Haves

Professional Engineer (PE) license.
Direct-to-chip or liquid cooling operational experience at AI-class rack densities.
Experience building or leading a mechanical commissioning or reliability program across multiple concurrent sites.
Familiarity with CMMS platforms, predictive maintenance tools, and thermal monitoring systems.
Proficiency in CFD tools (6SigmaET, Icepak) for operational troubleshooting and thermal validation.

Responsibilities

Lead end-to-end deployment and commissioning of mechanical and cooling systems across concurrent sites, from pre-deployment readiness through live handover to operations.
Own operational reliability of cooling infrastructure across the live fleet, diagnosing thermal performance issues and implementing fixes that hold at scale.
Build and maintain mechanical commissioning standards, acceptance test procedures, and runbooks for cooling systems (chillers, CDUs, direct liquid cooling) that site teams run independently.
Serve as the on-site technical authority through equipment startup, performance validation, and load testing, resolving field failures before they delay handover.
Set and enforce mechanical reliability standards across the portfolio: preventive maintenance thresholds, redundancy validation, and performance benchmarks under live AI load.