Staff Mechanical Operator — Data Center Operations

Fluidstack•Austin, TX

6d•$310,000 - $378,000•Onsite

About The Position

The Data Center Operations team keeps Fluidstack's AI data centers running around the clock, operating the mechanical, electrical, and controls systems that keep gigawatt-scale infrastructure online for frontier AI workloads. Examples of key problems the team is working on: Operate live chiller plants, CRAC/CRAH units, and direct-to-chip liquid cooling loops at densities where minutes of cooling loss mean thermal shutdown of GPU clusters. Build preventive and predictive maintenance programs that scale across new sites without adding downtime or headcount linearly. Take mechanical systems from commissioning handover to steady-state operations on compressed schedules, closing punch-list and performance gaps before they become incidents. Run root-cause analysis on mechanical failures and feed corrective actions back into design, operating procedures, and spare parts strategy.

Requirements

8+ years of hands-on mechanical or critical facilities operations in data centers, with time at a hyperscale operator, colocation provider, or cloud data center operations team.
Deep operating knowledge of chillers, cooling towers, CRAC/CRAH units, air handlers, pumps, and hydronic loops, including startup, failover, and recovery under load.
Fluency in BMS platforms: reading trends, tuning alarms, and diagnosing faults from controls data rather than waiting for equipment to fail.
A track record owning root-cause analysis and preventive maintenance programs at scale, not just executing tickets someone else wrote.
Experience as the senior mechanical escalation point on shift, making calls during outages when the runbook runs out.
Willingness to work rotating shifts and carry on-call responsibility for mechanical outages.
You operate calmly in high-uptime, fast-scaling environments where the plant you ran last quarter is half the size of the one you run now.

Nice To Haves

Experience with direct-to-chip liquid cooling and CDUs
CFC/HCFC refrigerant certification (EPA 608 Universal or equivalent)
A role in commissioning handover for new-build mechanical plant

Responsibilities

Own mechanical operations on shift as the top escalation point for chiller plant, CRAC/CRAH, air handler, pump, and cooling loop failures in a live, always-on facility.
Run preventive maintenance execution end to end: scheduling, vendor supervision, lockout/tagout, and QA of completed work, with records rigorous enough to survive a customer or owner audit.
Lead root-cause analysis for mechanical incidents and drive corrective actions to closure, including procedure updates, setpoint changes, and spare parts adjustments.
Build and maintain operating procedures (SOPs, MOPs, EOPs) for mechanical systems, and drill them so any operator on shift can execute under failure conditions.
Drive BMS alarm hygiene and trend analysis so degrading equipment gets caught and fixed before it trips, not after.
Close out commissioning-to-operations handovers for new mechanical plant, verifying performance against design before accepting systems into the maintenance program.