Mechanical Engineer, Thermofluids

ABOUT FLUIDSTACK

We exist to make humanity more free. For most of human history, you farmed or you starved. Technology gave people more time for the things they wanted to do, instead of things they had to do. 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. There are groups building AI who don't share these goals. Whoever deploys frontier compute infrastructure fastest will decide whether AI expands human freedom or shrinks it.

We're 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

- Be a barrel. Full autonomy. Own things end to end, take on scope without being asked, no permission required to operate outside your core role.

- Insane urgency. We drive everything forward as fast as possible.

- Reason from 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.

- Build something that actually matters. If you're going to spend your time, spend it on something that matters to the world.

THE THERMOFLUIDS R&D TEAM

Examples of key problems the team is working on

- Reject 10s of GW of heat, starting now. Fluidstack is targeting 10s of GW of compute over the next two years. Every watt of it becomes heat that has to go somewhere, and no cooling team has ever been asked to open at that scale rather than grow into it.

- Design and build the machines, because nobody can supply them. The merchant compressor market cannot deliver at this rate, and the vendor base behind today’s chillers will not scale to gigawatts. We are taking compressor and chiller design in house, working on machine architectures nobody sells today, and going from blank sheet to production faster than this industry thinks is possible.

- Own every thermofluids problem behind the fleet, not just the chiller. Working fluid and cycle architecture, heat exchangers at a scale that dominates the cost of the plant, two-phase heat transfer at the chip, and thermal energy storage. All of it is open, and whatever this team lands gets built thousands of times.

ROLE SCOPE

- Define what the machine has to be, owning the cycle model that sets the working fluid and the pressures, temperatures and flows the compressor, turbine and exchangers are designed against.

- Design heat exchangers with surface areas running into millions of square meters, among the largest single drivers of a data center’s physical footprint.

- Design the fluid system around the machine: piping, valves, headers, relief and isolation, sized against the pressure-drop budget the cycle can afford and the pressures the fluid actually runs at.

- Run the trades that decide the machine: air-side temperature rise, face velocity and subcooling. Derive the operating points from coupled exchanger ratings rather than asserted approach temperatures, so infeasible designs get caught in the model instead of in hardware.

- Take the cycle predictions onto the test stand and reconcile them against measured COP, then say plainly where the model was wrong.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

The below is a starting point. We always make space for exceptional people, so if you don't fit this role exactly, tell us where you would https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/fluidstack/05c2e69c-42f9-4fcb-9cf0-a467aaf98f1c.

- You’ve built a thermodynamic cycle model from fluid properties up and defended its assumptions to someone actively trying to break it. …