Data Center Facility Thermal Design Engineer

About the role

The Data Center Facility Design Engineer leads the end-to-end design, construction consultation, and operational readiness of customer data center environments, ensuring resilient, efficient, and scalable infrastructure across power, cooling, networking, and facility systems. This role is deeply technical and hands-on, requiring expertise in electrical and mechanical systems, redundancy planning, commissioning, and physical network integration.

Responsibilities

• Cooling & Mechanical Systems: Architect and optimize data center cooling systems, including CRAC/CRAH units, chillers, cooling towers, liquid cooling, and airflow management. Evaluate and recommend thermal redundancy strategies and ensure compliance with equipment heat-load requirements. Specify capacity management and cooling performance monitoring.
• Construction & Commissioning: Support data center construction projects, including design review, vendor selection, equipment installation, and commissioning. Manage coordination between electrical, mechanical, and other contractors. Ensure all work complies with regulatory, safety, and industry standards.
• Cluster Deployment: Write guidelines and specifications for rack installation, power provisioning, structured cabling, and equipment lifecycle management. Work with partners and contractors to conduct facility walkthroughs and incident responses during and after rack/cluster deployments. Maintain documentation including MOPs, SOPs, EOPs, and facility drawings. Support field engineering and data center operations teams and liaise with sites to perform root-cause analysis and implement corrective actions. Write functional specifications, design-verification plans, and functional test procedures.

Preferred Responsibilities

• Drive continuous improvement initiatives across facility design, commissioning, and operational workflows to enhance uptime, efficiency, and scalability.
• Serve as a technical advisor to cross-functional engineering teams, providing guidance on power architecture, cooling technologies, and physical network integration.
• Evaluate and recommend global suppliers, equipment vendors, and contractors based on performance, reliability, and alignment with long-term data center strategy.
• Establish and refine facility design standards, deployment guidelines, and best practices for AI cluster builds and high-density compute environments.
• Review and validate engineering drawings, specifications, and commissioning documentation to ensure compliance with ASHRAE, Uptime Institute, and applicable electrical/mechanical codes.
• Mentor field engineering and operations teams on troubleshooting methodologies, root-cause analysis, and preventive maintenance strategies.
• Influence roadmap decisions by providing data-driven insights into facility capacity, thermal performance, and infrastructure lifecycle planning.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Industrial Engineering, or a related engineering field.
• Advanced degrees (Master’s or higher) in relevant disciplines are beneficial for candidates involved in complex facility design or large-scale infrastructure planning.

Location

Austin, TX

Benefits

AMD benefits at a glance.