Controls Engineer, Energy Management

About the role

Fluidstack exists to make humanity more free by delivering 10 to 100s of GWs of compute faster than anyone else, rethinking every layer of the stack. The company acquires power, designs and builds data centers, and operates them with teams spanning hardware and software. Speed and scale are key differentiators.

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 – 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 – spend time on something that matters to the world.

The Facility Controls Team builds the control systems behind Fluidstack's data centers: real-time load control, MEP and behind-the-meter integration, automated commissioning, and autonomous deployment. Key problems include delivering controls behind gigawatt-scale data centers this decade, owning real-time load control and MEP and behind-the-meter integration, automating Level 4 and Level 5 commissioning, and driving autonomous, robotic deployment.

Responsibilities

• Own the control and data contract between the facility energy controller and third‑party power plant controllers.
• Define the objects, fields, units, update rates and staleness behavior that cross the boundary in each direction.
• Define the sequences of operation the controller executes (normal operation, generation shortfall, source transitions, blackstart and emergency shed, along with degradation behavior for each).
• Specify the point maps, interlocks and constraint classes that vendors build against, then hold them to it through factory and site acceptance.
• Translate between electrical and software: turn electrical and generation constraints into requirements the software team can build, and turn software and data constraints back into terms a plant vendor and an engineer of record will accept.
• Prove the interface in simulation before energization – every constraint class and every mode transition – then carry that work into automated commissioning.

Requirements

• Experience with protocols that move data between machines and systems (MQTT, OPC UA, REST APIs) and ability to justify choosing one over another for a given job.
• Ability to write and read code in at least one language well enough to prototype an integration, test a point map against a live device, and review what the software team ships (Python or Go preferred).
• Capability to read a one‑line and a panel schedule and predict what protection, breakers and sources will do under a fault.
• Experience designing a data contract between two systems (objects, fields, units, update rates, stale‑value handling) and holding both sides to it.
• Experience writing the control narrative for a system where two controllers had to agree, owning what happens when they disagree.
• Skill sitting between the controls world and the software world, fluent in both: turning control requirements from an electrical engineer into buildable software tasks and pushing back on software designs that would not survive the field.
• Experience pushing back on a vendor’s scope or internal assumptions with numbers rather than opinions.
• Bonus: Microgrid and behind‑the‑meter control (grid‑forming BESS, PV plant controllers, turbine and genset dispatch); utility and industrial protocols (DNP3, IEC 61850 GOOSE, IEC 60870‑5‑104, Modbus TCP); schema‑driven contracts (OpenAPI, JSON Schema); automated Level 4 and Level 5 commissioning.

Pay

Compensation Range: $200K - $250K