AI/HPC Cluster Thermal Design Engineer

About the role

We are seeking a Cluster Thermal Engineer to help architect and deliver scalable thermal solutions for AI/HPC clusters and data center deployments. The ideal candidate will support the evaluation, modeling, and validation of cooling architectures for high-density platforms, work closely with system architects, platform engineers, and data center operations teams, and contribute to flow-network modeling for liquid cooling and coolant distribution analyses.

Responsibilities

• Support the thermal design of AI/HPC cluster solutions, including compute racks, cooling loops, and facility interfaces.
• Aid in evaluating cooling architectures (air cooling, direct liquid cooling, hybrid approaches) and identifying trade-offs in performance, cost, complexity, and reliability.
• Build and refine thermal and airflow models for system/cluster/data center concepts using industry tools (e.g., OpenFOAM, ANSYS, FloTHERM, or similar).
• Contribute to flow-network modeling for liquid cooling and coolant distribution analyses to ensure adequate flow, pressure, and temperature margins.
• Help define and execute test plans to validate thermal performance at component, system, and rack/cluster levels.
• Support integration of cooling solutions and thermal telemetry at the cluster level in collaboration with power, networking, platform, firmware, and controls teams.
• Participate in design reviews with internal stakeholders and external partners/customers; summarize findings and track action items.
• Assist with experimental setup, instrumentation, data collection, and analysis in partnership with validation and lab teams.
• Create and maintain technical documentation, including requirements, design notes, modeling assumptions, test reports, and user/customer-facing summaries.
• Support issue triage and root-cause analysis for thermal performance and reliability concerns during bring-up and deployment.

Requirements

• Strong understanding of fundamentals: thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, and heat transfer.
• Familiarity with electronics cooling concepts (heat sinks, cold plates, TIMs, heat exchangers, pumps, valves, fans).
• Exposure to data center or cluster thermal concepts such as: rack/row layout considerations, CDU/coolant distribution, RDHx/AHU/fan-wall concepts, chilled water interfaces and heat rejection.
• Exposure to one or more thermal/CFD simulation tools (ANSYS, COMSOL, FloTHERM, OpenFOAM, or similar).
• Familiarity with measurement and validation practices (instrumentation, uncertainty, sensor placement, data analysis).
• Comfort working in cross-functional engineering environments and communicating technical ideas clearly.

Preferred Experience / Skills

• Understanding of PUE/WUE drivers, economizers/free cooling, or waste-heat reuse concepts.
• Projects, internships, or research related to HPC/AI infrastructure, data centers, or high-power electronics cooling.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s, Master’s or Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering with expertise in thermal management of electronics.

Skills

• Comfort working in cross-functional engineering environments and communicating technical ideas clearly.

Benefits

The benefits offered are described: AMD benefits at a glance.