Sr. Staff Engineer, AI Datacenter Thermal Management & Control Plane
$100,000 - $500,000 USD yearly
Originally posted 12 November 2026 by the employer.
About the role
Architect and deliver an intelligent thermal management control plane for AI datacenter infrastructure across compute hardware, rack-level liquid cooling, Coolant Distribution Units (CDUs), and facility infrastructure.
What you'll do
- Define and lead a scalable, hierarchical thermal control-plane architecture spanning servers, racks, rows, clusters, CDUs, facility cooling loops, chillers, cooling towers, and building management systems.
- Develop distributed, closed-loop control and optimization strategies that allocate cooling capacity and coordinate coolant temperatures, flow, pressure, pumps, valves, CDUs, and facility resources in response to workload demand and thermal conditions.
- Integrate third-party CDUs and facility infrastructure, including technology cooling systems and facility water systems, establishing operating envelopes, redundancy, failover, fault recovery, and coordination with BMS and industrial control systems.
- Lead control software and systems engineering by defining device-level interfaces, state machines, safety interlocks, fault isolation, cybersecurity, availability, monitoring, alerting, and predictive thermal management.
- Drive cross-functional system integration, validation, reliability testing, and production readiness, including thermal stability during workload changes and cooling or communications failures.
What you'll need
- BS, MS, or PhD in Electrical, Mechanical, Computer, or Controls Engineering, or a related technical discipline, and 12+ years of relevant engineering experience.
- Experience architecting and delivering complex distributed control systems, industrial automation, datacenter infrastructure, or thermal management systems integrating hardware, firmware, and software subsystems.
- Deep knowledge of liquid-cooling systems, including CDUs, coolant distribution networks, pumps, heat exchangers, valves, and facility cooling.
- Strong foundation in control theory, feedback systems, PID control, system modeling, and dynamic thermal management.
- Experience with industrial communication and management protocols such as Modbus, BACnet, OPC UA, MQTT, and Ethernet-based control networks, along with telemetry, real-time monitoring, and fault detection.
- Proven capability to set technical direction, make architecture decisions, and lead cross-functional engineering programs from concept through integration and deployment.
More semiconductor jobs: Tenstorrent jobs · Hardware design jobs · Austin jobs
First seen in our index 0 days ago, well below the 44-day median for Hardware Systems Engineering roles.
Hardware Systems Engineering · AI ML Hardware
|
Open roles in category
1157
|
Median days since first seen
44 d
|
Category median salary (all employers)
$148k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Tenstorrent | All employers we track in this specialty (1157 roles · 108 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 3 | 1157 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 23 | 6618 · 158 employers |
| Median days since first seen | 0 d | 44 d (+44 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | n/a | $148k |
Who's hiring in this category
- Intel Corporation · 93 open roles · median 34 d
- KLA Corporation · 66 open roles · median 62 d
- Applied Materials · 65 open roles · median 36 d
- NVIDIA · 62 open roles · median 75 d
- ASML · 58 open roles · median 21 d
- Teradyne · 58 open roles · median 53 d
How we counted: 1157 open Hardware Systems Engineering (AI ML Hardware) roles from 108 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 12 Nov 2026. Specialty figures count only roles carrying this exact specialty label, so an employer's related work in neighbouring specialties is not included there, and is counted in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family row. Days are counted from when our index first saw each posting, not from the employer's original posting date.