Principal Operations Engineer, Reliability — Data Center Operations

Fluidstack

3d•$150,000 - $250,000•Hybrid

About The Position

We exist to make humanity more free. Powerful AI will be the biggest lever for human choice we've ever built - but only if models are aligned with what humanity actually wants. Whoever deploys frontier compute infrastructure fastest will decide whether AI expands human freedom or shrinks it. Fluidstack is singularly focused on delivering 10 to 100s of GWs of compute faster than anyone else, rethinking every layer of the stack. We acquire power, design and build data centers, and operate them - with teams spanning hardware and software. Speed and scale are our key differentiators. Come be a part of building civilization-scale infrastructure for AI. We hire people who care deeply about this problem space. If that is you, please apply! How We Operate: Extreme ownership. Full autonomy. Own things end to end often taking on scope outside your core role without being asked to get things done. Velocity. We drive everything forward as fast as possible. First principles. Challenge every assumption. Zero analogy thinking, no egos, the best idea wins. Love of the game. The frontier of AI is the most interesting problem of our time. We put in long hours at high intensity to push the frontier forward. The Data Center Operations Team: Examples of key problems the team is working on: Operate at the scale of a nation, not a building. Accelerating toward 100 GW by the end of the decade, roughly the entire electricity consumption of Japan. You won't just run a data center; you'll run infrastructure the size of a G7. Fly the plane while it's being built. Running flawless operations inside a live construction zone, adapting in real time and turning the pace of build-out into our advantage. You will redefine operational excellence. Write the playbook, don't inherit it. Most operators step into someone else's system. Here you build one, leaving your fingerprints on how the whole company runs. As we scale 100x, you'll set the standards, shape the operating model, and grow the team by the thousands.

Requirements

You’ve run a live critical operation and led a team of operators, and you carry the deep, earned judgment that comes from owning the floor when it counts.
You’ve been the person a site calls when something breaks, triaged the problem over the phone, and known exactly when to escalate and when to let the field team work it.
You’ve authored root cause analyses on significant events and tracked corrective actions to closure, and you can show the difference between an RCA that closed a ticket and one that killed a class of failure.
You’ve sat with a pile of RCA actions and cut it to the few that matter, because you know an operation that commits to everything finishes nothing.
You’ve traveled site to site, walked the floor, and left each operation better than you found it, carrying the practices that worked from one into the next.
You’ve written the standard, not just followed it, audited real sites against it without flinching from what you found, and can hold one bar across domains you don’t all live in.

Nice To Haves

Hyperscale or large colocation at hundreds of MW+.
Direct exposure to Hardware or Network operations, not only Facilities, incident.io or equivalent incident tooling, plus DCIM.
Building an assessment, audit, qualification, or training program from scratch.

Responsibilities

Take the on-call escalation when a site hits trouble and triage it virtually, using real knowledge of the team and the systems to decide what to escalate, when, and how to keep the field crew focused without burying them.
Get on a plane when it matters: travel site to site (50%+) to work live incidents and post-incident reviews on the floor, and bring the practices that worked elsewhere with you.
Own root cause analysis on significant events through to closure and track corrective actions to done, killing the underlying class of failure rather than the one instance in front of you.
Read the patterns across the fleet’s incidents and RCAs, push the few highest-value learnings through to closure, and stay honest about what’s achievable and what to drop instead of boiling the ocean.
Carry learnings and practices from one campus to the next so a fix at one site becomes the standard everywhere before the failure repeats.
Write the operational Assessment standard and audit each campus against it, feeding what you find straight back into the corrective-action loop.