Principal Power Systems Engineer, AWS Global Energy

About the role

We are seeking an experienced electrical engineer with extensive experience in power infrastructure design, including power generation and power systems, with a deep understanding of the physics and mathematics of energy systems to support our growing requirements for novel solutions to delivering power to AWS data centers. We are looking for candidates with proven ability to influence technical teams, a track record of delivering complex power systems from design and specification through deployment, and a deep understanding of energy and power systems.

The Principal Power System Engineer provides the vision, rationale, and recommendations to leadership teams from AWS and our partners for next-generation data center power design, while ensuring current systems meet performance and operational standards. You understand key problems and propose and analyze multiple solutions to produce the most efficient, cost-effective, resilient, and scalable electrical designs achievable. You routinely stay ahead of the latest technology developments and build engineering strategies that will meet the most demanding requirements.

Key job responsibilities

• You understand current and emerging scalable power and energy technologies, and how to apply them to solve emerging challenges in power system design
• You understand current trends in data center power demands and grid integration of large loads
• Have a deep understanding of analytical methods for evaluating power demands throughout the data center architecture and means to maximize capacity and utilization
• Understand grid interconnection standards and requirements, including working on microgrid design and controls, and distributed energy resources
• Leads the team in developing test requirements to ensure solutions meet AWS' high standards for quality and availability and set the expectation for quality in the engineering team
• You oversee and plan engineering goals for key initiatives that support future projects and growth and build engineering strategies. You conceive, initiate, and lead projects with widespread impact on infrastructure design, innovation, and implementation.
• Understanding the design and functionality of the global data center fleet, including existing, upcoming, and unique site designs
• Provide input and direction to Data Center Engineering teams for design revisions for new data centers as well as to Field Engineering for operational data center upgrades to meet critical strategic requirements
• You demonstrate ability to review business cases and analysis models including Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and Return on Investment (ROI) to select projects and designs
• You decompose complex problems or new technologies or topologies to distill underlying risks and benefits, and identify straightforward and actionable solutions to reduce risk
• Create and lead the development of power generation configurations for different applications, including primary, temporary, or backup power
• You work independently and have frequent reviews with business leadership, other Principal Engineers, and Sr Engineers across AWS
• You actively facilitate the escalation of low-level project and product issues to senior engineering and business leadership
• Working on concurrent projects in multiple geographical regions
• Being a leader within the group as well as within other teams. You actively grow and coach the engineering team through group forums and one-on-one coaching and mentoring to ensure development and promotion of the top engineers inside Amazon
• Being positive and offer creative, out of the box solutions
• Continuously learning curious about how things work, and willing to test and push new ideas
• Having fun and working hard!

About the team

The Power Generation Solutions team creates and delivers product and engineering solutions in for power and energy to help advance AWS' mission to deliver world-leading cloud services. Our solutions are guided by four main principles; unlocking capacity growth, maintaining high infrastructure uptime, minimizing infrastructure costs, and advancing our net-zero carbon Climate Pledge. To deliver these solutions, our team provides technical input to realize a shared vision and strategy with partner teams and provides engineering support across the project or product lifecycle to deliver the solution. We also provide grid analytics and manage and develop models for determining the total energy and water use within our fleet of data centers and work with partners on improving overall performance.

Basic qualifications

• 10+ years of experience with power systems and electrical design with at least 5 years in data centers or high availability, mission-critical applications
• Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering or equivalent experience
• In-depth knowledge of continuous operating redundant electrical systems and power infrastructure. This includes but is not limited to; uninterruptable power sources, medium and low voltage electrical switchgear, power distribution units, variable frequency drives, automatic/static transfer switches.
• Experience and knowledge of power generations equipment, systems, controls, including, but not limited to; diesel generators, distributed energy resources, gas turbines, battery energy storage systems.
• Extensive experience in electrical power design, including interpreting wiring diagrams, single and three-line diagrams, P&ID drawings, sequence of operations, and electrical drawing packages, failure mode analysis.
• Experience leading cross-functional technical teams and collaborating with multiple engineering disciplines
• Proficiency with electrical design tools and analysis software

Preferred qualifications

• Master's degree or Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering or related field
• 15+ years of direct experience with the design, construction, operation, or maintenance of mission critical data centers or power infrastructure
• Licensed Professional Engineer
• Familiarity with power flow studies, substation design, protection coordination, and utility interconnection requirements, emerging power generation and energy storage technologies, and power distribution for large scale mission critical facilities
• System Matter Expert level of understanding of both electrical equipment and designs related to data centers and power generation equipment
• Experience with gathering, compiling, and analyzing data to identify availability and/or performance risks within the design and operations of critical power infrastructure, including an understanding of data analysis methodologies and statistical techniques. Ability to produce analyses that ensure data centers satisfy defined design requirements, including availability goals, power quality specifications, and predicted performance targets.
• Experience with developing solutions and executing plans on fast-track design/build projects and/or multiple significant upgrade projects
• Experience with commissioning and/or performance testing of critical infrastructure and the associated controls systems for mission critical environments
• Experience with scripting languages (e.g., Python, R), or statistical/mathematical software (e.g., R, SAS, Matlab, etc.) and machine learning or related optimization frameworks
• Possess excellent attention to detail and communication skills in order to maintain high quality standards for being organized, setting priorities, meeting deadlines, and staying within budgets
• Possess leadership and problem-solving skills