Microgrid Architect Lead, Power Generation

Fluidstack•Austin, TX

10d•$263,000 - $330,000

About The Position

Fluidstack is building civilization-scale infrastructure for AI and is singularly focused on delivering 10 to 100s of GWs of compute faster than anyone else. This involves acquiring power, designing and building data centers, and operating them. The Power Generation Team is responsible for building an islanded grid at gigawatt scale from a blank sheet, where generation, storage, and compute run without utility support. The goal is to get power online in months, not years, by generating their own power and avoiding long interconnection queues. The team aims to create a repeatable power block and cluster unit that can be built thousands of times, and to design a grid where the largest load (compute) can respond and participate in grid stability. This role requires owning the system design basis, setting standards for equipment, building and owning the model of record, and establishing the stability and protection philosophy for these large-scale islanded grids.

Requirements

Delivered a real islanded or very weak-grid power system at 100MW or more, on an island or remote utility, a mining or LNG captive plant, an OEM power systems group, or a specialist islanded-systems practice. A grid-tied microgrid is not the same problem.
Build the models with your own hands, deep EMT work in PSCAD or equivalent alongside RMS, and have personally produced the load flow, short circuit and stability results that decisions were made on.
Designed around grid-forming inverter control and inverter-dominated protection, where there is little or no synchronous machine underneath you to hide behind.
Personally owned a system design basis that vendors were held to, and have rejected a vendor or EPC study that did not meet it.
Been in the room when an island went dark, and were the one who had to explain why.
Set standards that OEMs and EPCs actually comply with, GE, Caterpillar, Tesla and their equivalents, on technical authority rather than headcount or a title.
Designed something that got built many times over, and hold the discipline that comes with it: freeze a design, say no to the change that would have been a small improvement and a large disruption, and have watched what a late revision does to a supply chain.
Spend time where the work happens, and the standards written are shaped by what was seen installers and operators actually do rather than by what the drawing assumed they would.

Nice To Haves

ERCOT market and interconnection dynamics.
GW-scale HV substation design (230kV and above).
Professional Engineer licence.
Toyota Production System or lean practice applied to design and build (standard work, built-in quality, design freeze discipline).
Load shedding and dispatch schemes that treat flexible load as a participating resource.
Utility control room and switching order design.

Responsibilities

Own the system design basis for the islanded grid, fixing voltage levels, topology, grounding, redundancy boundaries and the repeatable block and cluster unit, with v1 and the site and block single-lines issued inside six months.
Treat the block as a product rather than a project, holding one standard design across sites, driving out the variation that turns a repeatable build back into bespoke engineering, and freezing the design early enough that procurement and construction are never absorbing late change.
Write the internal grid code that every generator, BESS, inverter, transformer and ITR must meet, own the conformance evidence that proves compliance before equipment ships rather than after it lands, and own the technical content of generation and electrical equipment specifications and the technical evaluation of bids, with v0.1 in vendors' hands before the first major RFP.
Build the model of record yourself and own the study register, producing the first-pass generation, BESS and reserve sizing and the first load flow, short circuit and transient stability results, then accepting or rejecting every vendor and EPC study against it.
Set the stability and protection philosophy, covering the loss-of-largest-unit contingency, reserve policy and a load shedding scheme with compute as a participating resource, and negotiate the load behaviour specification with the compute side that everything downstream depends on.
Own the phasing rule, so whether the next block can be energised safely is your call at every intermediate build state, and set the prioritised study roadmap that says which studies must be in hand before long-lead procurement commits.
Close the loop from the field back into the standard, going to site to see how the design is actually built and operated, and folding every commissioning finding and every installer workaround into the next revision so block fifty goes in faster and cleaner than block one.
Hire the specialists behind you in sequence: a protection and HV substation engineer, a studies and EMT engineer to take modelling off your desk, and the operations counterpart who will own dispatch, reserves and switching orders long before commissioning.