# Staff Mechanical Operator

**Company:** [Fluidstack](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/fluidstack)
**Location:** Austin, TX
**Role:** Hardware Engineering
**Salary:** $310k – $378k/yr
**Experience:** 8+ years
**Skills:** bms, chillers, cooling towers, crac, crah, air handlers, pumps, hydronic loops, Root Cause Analysis, preventive maintenance, SOPs, mops, eops, direct-to-chip liquid cooling, epa 608
**Posted:** 2026-07-21

> Own mechanical operations and escalation for chiller plants, CRAC/CRAH units, and cooling systems in live gigawatt-scale AI data centers. Lead preventive maintenance, root-cause analysis, procedure development, and commissioning handovers while working rotating shifts in a fast-scaling environment.

## Job Description

## Role Scope
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.

## 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.

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