PCS Lead Engineer, Power Generation

About the role

Fluidstack exists to make humanity more free. Technology gave people more time for the things they wanted to do instead of things they had to do. Powerful AI will be the biggest lever for human choice ever built — but only if models are aligned with what humanity actually wants. Whoever deploys frontier compute infrastructure fastest will decide whether AI expands human freedom or shrinks it. Fluidstack is singularly focused on delivering 10 to 100s of GWs of compute faster than anyone else, rethinking every layer of the stack: acquiring power, designing and building data centers, and operating them with teams spanning hardware and software. Speed and scale are the 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. 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.

The Power Generation Team is tackling problems including: building an islanded grid at gigawatt scale from a blank sheet — generation, storage, and compute running with no utility behind them, where the machine you design is the only thing holding frequency; getting power online in months, not years, by generating our own power so a site goes from signed lease to live compute inside six months; making one power block and building it a thousand times with a repeatable block and cluster unit validated once and stamped across the fleet; and designing a grid whose largest load answers back — compute is not passive demand here, and load behaviour, curtailment, and shedding are design variables you negotiate and specify.

Responsibilities

• Own the power conversion layer across storage and solar: PCS and inverter topology, DC architecture, filtering, and the conversion interface to MV collection as one standard repeated across concurrent gigawatt sites.
• Write the PCS and inverter specification vendors bid against, qualify platforms on measured behavior rather than datasheet, and hold OEM engineering to the spec through factory witness testing, site acceptance, and warranty.
• Set converter-level control requirements for firm load, grid-forming and grid-following operation, ride-through, step-load response, and reactive capability, and hand a defensible interface to the storage, controls, and protection leads.
• Lead conversion-side energization and commissioning in the field through first charge and discharge, islanding and transfer tests, and step-load testing against real AI load profiles.
• Root-cause converter trips, derates, and firmware regressions across the fleet, and fold every fix back into the standard design so the next site does not repeat it.

Requirements

• Taken power conversion from specification to energized and dispatching on grid-scale storage or solar, and can name the sites and the megawatts.
• Written an inverter or PCS specification that a vendor bid against, then held that vendor to it when their standard product did not meet it.
• Debugged converter behavior in the field from scope traces, power quality captures, and event records, and changed a setting or a firmware build as a result.
• Specified or validated grid-forming operation on a plant that has to survive islanded, and knows where the vendor datasheet stops matching the hardware.
• Carried a failure from a field symptom to a change in the standard design, not just to a site-level workaround.
• Write clearly enough that an OEM engineer, a commissioning agent, and a CEO each get the decision they need out of the same document.
• Bonus: Grid-forming control and EMT validation (PSCAD, EMTP, PLECS); converter design at the hardware level (magnetics, thermal, SiC and IGBT device selection); BESS and inverter certification (UL 1741 SA and SB, IEEE 1547, UL 9540A); named PCS platforms (Power Electronics, SMA, EPC Power, Sungrow, Tesla); behind-the-meter and islanded microgrid operation; Professional Engineer license.

Pay

Compensation Range: $330K - $390K