Operations and Delivery Engineering Lead, Critical Facilities

Fluidstack•Austin, TX

3d•$260,000 - $300,000•Hybrid

About The Position

We are seeking an experienced Operations and Delivery Engineering Lead to own the engineering scope of our data centers across their full life cycle — from sites under construction, through turnover, to all subsequent engineering work performed on live infrastructure. This is a senior, people-management role spanning mechanical/cooling, electrical/power, controls/BMS, and fire/life safety. You will lead a multi-disciplinary team of engineers who own technical support of sites under construction, support the commissioning effort through turnover, and act as the engineering owner for any work performed on the building once it is live — additions, modifications, retrofits, controls changes, capacity moves, and incident-driven fixes. The construction-phase presence is deliberate: in partnership with Design Engineering, the team builds a thorough, first-hand understanding of how each building is put together and how it is intended to operate, so that by the time it goes live the engineers who will own its life cycle already know it inside and out. You chair the site Change Control Board (CCB), where you approve technical changes to data center systems and the way they operate. You do not run day-to-day operations — that sits with the Critical Facilities Operations team — and you do not own design or commissioning — those sit with Design Engineering and the Commissioning Agent — but you set the engineering bar both functions execute against and serve as the engineering escalation point when something on site doesn’t behave the way it was designed to. You partner closely with Design Engineering, Construction, Commissioning Agents, Critical Facilities Operations, Capacity Planning, and equipment vendors. You are equally comfortable walking a job site with a GC, red-lining a one-line diagram, reviewing a Sequence of Operations, chairing a CCB, and standing up an engineering bridge during a complex incident. This role requires approximately 50% travel to live job sites and data centers.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical, Electrical, or Controls Engineering, a related engineering/technical field, OR an equivalent combination of technical training and directly relevant experience.
Minimum 8–10 years of hands-on experience in critical facilities engineering, construction support, or mission-critical infrastructure delivery, including 2+ years in a team lead or people-management capacity.
Demonstrated experience across both new-build delivery (on-site technical support during construction, commissioning support, turnover) and engineering work on live data center infrastructure.
Breadth across mechanical/cooling, electrical/power, and controls/BMS, with enough depth to lead design review and troubleshooting across all of them.
Strong working knowledge of critical facility systems: chilled water and air handling, generators, UPS and switchgear, and BMS/EPMS platforms (Ignition, Schneider EcoStruxure, Johnson Controls Metasys, Tridium Niagara, or equivalent).
Proven ownership of formal change management — ideally as a CCB chair or equivalent — including MOP/SOP/EOP review and approval.
Working knowledge of NEC, NFPA 70E, and LOTO/LOTOTO procedures.
Excellent leadership, communication, and documentation skills, with the ability to make sound risk decisions across competing construction and operations priorities.
Willingness and ability to travel approximately 50% to live job sites and data centers.

Nice To Haves

Experience leading engineering teams across both delivery and operations in a Tier III/IV data center, colocation facility, or hyperscale environment.
Direct experience leading large retrofits or major capacity additions on energized critical infrastructure.
Professional Engineer (PE) license or equivalent.
Uptime Institute ATD/AOS or equivalent data center industry credential.
OSHA 30 General Industry certification and formal incident-command/emergency-management training.

Responsibilities

Lead, coach, and develop a multi-disciplinary team of delivery and lifecycle engineers; own hiring, onboarding, performance management, career development, and retention.
Set the technical bar across disciplines and ensure each engineer has clear ownership across the projects, buildings, and systems in their portfolio.
Plan and prioritize the team’s workload across construction support, commissioning support, lifecycle engineering work on live infrastructure, and engineering escalations from Operations.
Build and maintain an on-call rotation that provides qualified engineering support to Operations and to active construction sites when issues exceed the operating team’s authority.
Foster a strong safety culture and a blameless, learning-oriented approach to incidents, near-misses, and commissioning findings.
Own technical support of sites under construction in partnership with Design Engineering; embed engineers as the on-site technical resource across mechanical, electrical, controls, and fire/life safety scopes.
Use the construction phase to develop a deep, first-hand understanding of how each building is constructed and how it is intended to operate, so that the engineers who will own its life cycle are fully fluent in the asset before it goes live.
Represent the Operations and Delivery Engineering team in design reviews, constructability reviews, submittal reviews, and RFI/change-order decisions; flag deviations from design intent and route them back to Design Engineering for resolution.
Provide technical support to the Commissioning Agent and Design Engineering through FAT, SAT, and Levels 1–5 commissioning, including review of functional test scripts and witness participation where useful, without assuming ownership of the commissioning program.
Lead the operational readiness and turnover process: ensure new systems are fully documented, alarmed, integrated into BMS/EPMS/DCIM, trained on, and supportable before they carry critical load.
Hold GCs, subcontractors, and vendors to the site’s safety, quality, and documentation standards through energization and turnover.
Own the engineering scope for any work performed on live data center infrastructure, regardless of size or type — capacity additions, equipment replacements, controls and BMS/EPMS changes, electrical or mechanical configuration changes, retrofits, and incident-driven remediation.
Scope, design, and project-manage lifecycle work in partnership with Design Engineering and Operations, from concept through execution and back-to-service.
Maintain a forward-looking view of site risk, single points of failure, and system interdependencies, and convert that view into a prioritized lifecycle and reliability roadmap.
Provide engineering input to capacity and load reviews so additions and changes stay within the safe operating envelope of mechanical and electrical infrastructure.
Chair the site Change Control Board; own the process, cadence, quorum, and decision record.
Review and approve all technical changes to data center systems and to the way those systems operate, including BMS/EPMS logic changes, setpoint and Sequence of Operations changes, electrical topology changes, and mechanical configuration changes.
Set the standard for what a CCB-grade change package looks like: risk assessment, blast radius, MOP/SOP/EOP impact, rollback plan, validation criteria, and communications plan.
Ensure every approved change is properly documented, executed against an approved MOP, validated, and reflected in as-builts, point lists, one-lines, and program backups.
Track CCB throughput, change success rate, and change-induced incidents as engineering KPIs, and drive continuous improvement of the change process.
Serve as the senior technical escalation point for the Operations team across all disciplines; lead root-cause analysis on complex, cross-system faults and drive corrective actions to closure.
Review and approve MOPs, SOPs, and EOPs authored by Operations or vendors; own the engineering content of those procedures even though execution sits with Operations.
Analyze trend, historian, and alarm data across BMS/EPMS/DCIM to identify degradation, tune performance, and convert findings into CCB-approved changes.
Lead engineering participation in incident response, drills, and post-incident reviews; ensure lessons learned land as documented changes, not tribal knowledge.
Maintain the engineering source of truth for the site: as-builts, one-lines, point lists, Sequences of Operations, controls program backups, and the asset and documentation library.
Ensure all engineering and delivery work is performed in compliance with NFPA 70E, including PPE selection, arc flash boundary awareness, and energized work permitting.
Own engineering enforcement of LOTO/LOTOTO procedures for work on or near energized electrical and mechanical equipment, including during construction tie-ins and commissioning.
Ensure the site meets applicable codes and standards (NEC, NFPA, OSHA) and maintains audit-ready engineering and change documentation.