Senior Mechanical Engineer (Data Centers)

Who You Are:

The Senior Mechanical Engineer, Data Center Operations Engineering & Reliability provides full-lifecycle mechanical engineering support across the data center portfolio, from site design and construction through commissioning, turnover, and enduring operations.

This role serves as an operations-focused technical owner for mechanical infrastructure, ensuring systems are designed, built, commissioned, maintained, and operated in a way that protects uptime, preserves design intent, supports redundancy models, and improves long-term asset reliability.

The role partners with site operations, design and construction, commissioning, controls/BMS, vendors, OEMs, finance, and enterprise reliability leadership to translate design decisions and construction outcomes into safe, maintainable, and reliable operations.

What You’ll Do:

This position supports the enterprise reliability strategy, maintenance governance, asset lifecycle planning, engineering standards, RCA discipline, technical escalation model, commissioning lessons learned, and continuous improvement objectives owned by the VP, Operational Reliability & Engineering.

Key Responsibilities

1. Site Design and Pre-Construction Support

• Provide mechanical engineering input during site selection, concept design, schematic design, design development, and construction document reviews.
• Review mechanical design packages for operational readiness, maintainability, service access, system redundancy, capacity, resiliency, and preservation of design intent.
• Evaluate mechanical system designs, including chilled water systems, air-cooled and water-cooled chillers, pumps, cooling towers, CRAH/CRAC units, heat exchangers, economizers, valves, piping, filtration, humidification, water treatment systems, and supporting infrastructure.
• Identify design risks that could create future operational issues, single points of failure, maintenance access constraints, reliability gaps, or lifecycle cost exposure.
• Participate in constructability reviews, value engineering discussions, submittal reviews, RFI resolution, equipment selection reviews, and design standard updates.
• Partner with design and construction teams to ensure mechanical systems align with enterprise standards, OEM requirements, warranty protections, and long-term operating expectations.

2. Construction, Commissioning, Turnover, and Operational Readiness

• Support construction-phase technical reviews to ensure installed mechanical systems remain aligned with approved design intent, redundancy models, sequence requirements, and operating requirements.
• Review and provide input on commissioning plans, functional performance tests, integrated systems tests, failure-mode tests, and sequence-of-operations validation.
• Validate that mechanical alarms, controls sequences, set points, trends, and BMS visibility support safe and reliable operations.
• Ensure turnover packages include complete O&M manuals, as-built drawings, asset data, warranty information, spare parts requirements, PM tasks, training materials, and vendor service requirements.
• Confirm site operations teams are prepared to operate, maintain, and troubleshoot mechanical systems before handoff to enduring operations.
• Capture construction and commissioning lessons learned and incorporate them into standards, operating procedures, maintenance programs, and future designs.

3. Enduring Operations and Reliability Engineering

• Serve as a mechanical technical escalation point for site operations during incidents, abnormal operating conditions, environmental excursions, equipment failures, and reliability concerns.
• Analyze mechanical system performance trends, including temperature, humidity, flow, pressure, valve position, pump performance, chiller efficiency, economizer operation, and controls stability.
• Lead or support root cause analysis for mechanical incidents, near misses, recurring alarms, capacity constraints, and equipment failures.
• Develop corrective and preventive actions that eliminate repeat failure modes and reduce operational risk.
• Partner with controls/BMS teams to improve alarm rationalization, monitoring, trending, sequence performance, and operator visibility.
• Provide engineering guidance for live-site maintenance activities, system isolations, change management reviews, MOPs, SOPs, EOPs, and risk assessments.
• Own the mechanical sequence-of-operations documentation as a living artifact post-turnover, ensuring it stays current as systems, set points, and control strategies evolve during enduring operations.

4. Maintenance, Asset Lifecycle, and Risk Management

• Define, review, and improve preventative maintenance standards for critical mechanical equipment across the operating portfolio.
• Ensure maintenance practices align with OEM recommendations, warranty requirements, contractual uptime commitments, and site-specific operating conditions.
• Support reliability-centered maintenance and predictive maintenance programs where appropriate, using asset condition, failure history, service records, and operating data.
• Develop mechanical asset criticality frameworks to prioritize inspection, maintenance, testing, spare parts, capital replacement, and engineering oversight.
• Partner with finance, operations, and reliability leadership to support long-term capital replacement forecasts tied to equipment degradation, age, risk, and lifecycle cost.
• Review vendor service quality, maintenance documentation, corrective maintenance effectiveness, and spare parts strategies for critical mechanical systems.
• Own the water treatment and chemistry monitoring program for chilled water and condenser water systems, including chemistry limits, treatment equipment performance, ongoing monitoring cadence, and coordination with water treatment vendors to protect system integrity and heat transfer efficiency.

5. Standards, Governance, and Continuous Improvement

• Develop and maintain mechanical engineering standards, operating playbooks, troubleshooting guides, technical bulletins, and review frameworks for the operations organization.
• Support management of change processes to ensure mechanical modifications are reviewed for reliability, redundancy impact, maintainability, documentation, training, and operational readiness.
• Translate site-level incidents, near misses, asset performance issues, and commissioning findings into portfolio-wide improvements.
• Help establish engineering competencies, technical training content, and qualification expectations for mechanical operations support.
• Reduce single points of technical dependency by documenting knowledge, coaching site teams, and strengthening internal engineering capability.
• Promote disciplined risk evaluation, technical documentation, and cross-functional decision-making across design, construction, commissioning, and operations.

What We’re Looking For:

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering or a closely related technical discipline.
• 8-10 years of progressive mechanical engineering experience, with at least 5 years supporting data centers, mission-critical facilities, central plants, industrial facilities, or other 24x7 high-availability environments.
• Demonstrated experience supporting mechanical infrastructure across design review, construction support, commissioning, turnover, maintenance, troubleshooting, and enduring operations.
• Strong working knowledge of data center or mission-critical mechanical systems, including cooling plants, air handling systems, pumps, heat rejection equipment, piping, valves, controls, and redundancy configurations.
• Experience reviewing mechanical drawings, equipment submittals, sequence-of-operations documents, commissioning scripts, test reports, O&M manuals, and maintenance documentation.
• Ability to troubleshoot complex mechanical issues in live operational environments and make sound recommendations that balance uptime, safety, cost, schedule, and long-term reliability.
• Experience with preventative maintenance, root cause analysis, corrective action planning, asset lifecycle management, and operational risk assessment.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to explain technical issues clearly to site operations, leadership, vendors, design teams, construction teams, and commissioning partners.

Preferred Qualifications

• 10+ years of mechanical engineering experience in large-scale data center, mission-critical, or multi-site critical infrastructure environments.
• Professional Engineer license or Engineer-in-Training certification.
• Experience serving as a senior mechanical technical escalation point for live operational facilities.
• Experience supporting new data center builds, major expansions, retrofits, integrated systems testing, and operational turnover.
• Knowledge of Uptime Institute Tier concepts, ASHRAE guidance, OEM maintenance requirements, and data center availability expectations.
• Experience with BMS platforms, mechanical controls troubleshooting, alarm strategy, trend analysis, and sequence optimization.
• Familiarity with predictive maintenance technologies, thermal modeling, CFD, digital asset management, CMMS data quality, or reliability analytics.
• Experience developing mechanical standards, SOPs, MOPs, EOPs, RCA templates, training materials, and engineering governance processes.

Key Competencies

• Mission-critical mechanical engineering expertise.
• Operational reliability mindset and strong risk recognition.
• Ability to identify design, construction, commissioning, and operating issues before they become outages.
• Practical understanding of how design and construction decisions impact long-term operations.
• Strong troubleshooting, incident response, and root cause analysis capability.
• Clear technical communication and cross-functional leadership.
• Discipline around change management, documentation, governance, and lessons learned.
• Ability to create scalable standards for a growing operating portfolio.

Success Measures

• Improved mechanical system reliability and reduced repeat mechanical incidents.
• Strong uptime performance across supported data center sites.
• Successful transition of new sites from design and construction into stable operations.
• Reduction in emergency corrective maintenance related to mechanical systems.
• Improved mechanical asset health visibility and long-term capital replacement planning.
• Standardized mechanical maintenance practices, technical documentation, and operating expectations across the portfolio.
• Fewer design, commissioning, and turnover issues impacting operations.
• Increased technical capability of site operations teams and reduced reliance on external consultants for core mechanical expertise.
• Overall reduction in operational SLA violation risk due to operational support (programs/processes/tooling).

What We Offer (Dallas):

• Competitive base salary and discretionary bonus

• Flexible Time Off (i.e. unlimited paid vacation days)
• Company paid Holidays (14)
• Company paid sick leave
• Company-paid health and protective benefits for employees, partners, and other dependents
• 3% 401(k) company contribution
• Generous paid Parental Leave
• Free virtual coaching and counseling sessions through Ginger
• Free daily snacks in-office
• Smart, entrepreneurial, and fun colleagues
• Employee Resource Groups

*Benefits may vary depending on location.

Apply now and join us as we grow the economy that runs on code.