Controls Engineer, Thermofluids

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.

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

• Own the control architecture for the machine and the test rigs, spanning the compressor, the motor drive, the expansion turbine and the loop around them.
• Write the safety interlocks and fault handling for a machine whose working fluid can cross its critical point inside the normal operating range, taking the control problem with it.
• Deliver capacity control through motor and turbine speed rather than throttling valves, keeping the process fluid path free of valves at the design point.
• Validate the control system against hardware-in-the-loop before it ever touches the real machine, and prove the interlocks fire.
• Carry the controls out of the test cell and into the production chiller, including integration with site BMS and the wider plant.

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

• You’ve written control logic for rotating machinery and you were in the room the first time it ran.
• You’ve designed interlocks where a fault means destroyed hardware or an injured person, and you can justify every one of them from first principles.
• You’ve run hardware-in-the-loop testing that caught something real before it reached commissioning.
• You’ve tuned loops on a live machine and worked out why the model and the plant disagreed.
• You’ve handed a control system to people who did not write it, with documentation they could actually use at three in the morning.
• Bonus: Propulsion or vehicle test controls (engine sequencing, abort and safing logic). Variable-speed drives and high-speed motor control (VFDs, magnetic bearing controllers). Refrigeration and chiller control (superheat, head pressure, capacity staging). Industrial control platforms (Beckhoff, Siemens, Allen-Bradley, CODESYS). Model-based development and HIL (Simulink, dSPACE, NI VeriStand).

We are committed to pay equity and transparency.

You will receive a confirmation email once your application has successfully been accepted. If there is an error with your submission and you did not receive a confirmation email, please email with your resume/CV, the role you've applied for, and the date you submitted your application-- someone from our recruiting team will be in touch.