Mechanical Commissioning Lead - Mission Critical

Position Summary

This role is GMC's technical authority for critical cooling. You own how GMC commissions mechanical systems across Levels 1 through 5 in mission-critical environments: chilled water plants, thermal storage, air-side cooling, and, increasingly the deciding factor on these projects, direct-to-chip liquid cooling.

This is a build-the-practice role, not a staff-the-practice role. Expect your first year to run roughly 70 percent authorship and standards development, 20 percent field support and escalation, and 10 percent business development. That balance shifts toward field leadership and team management as the group grows.

• Test development (≈70% of year one). Author L2A installation, L2B static, and L3 prefunctional checklists and L4 functional and L5 integrated test scripts for chillers, chilled and condenser water pumps and variable frequency drives, cooling towers, thermal energy storage, coolant distribution units, fan wall units, computer room air handlers, rear-door heat exchangers, leak detection, and chilled water plant controls. This also covers the mechanical MOP/SOP template library and L0 commissionability review.
• Liquid cooling authority. Own GMC's technical position on direct-to-chip cooling: facility water and technology cooling loop separation, heat exchanger approach performance, secondary loop fill medium and water quality, quick-disconnect and dripless coupling verification, redundant pump failover, and the dual supply-temperature control valve interaction that is a recurring source of instability in coolant distribution unit control loops.
• Heat load test strategy. Define staged heat load application, load bank and rack simulation approach, instrumentation, data capture intervals, and acceptance criteria against design flow, differential temperature, and capacity.
• Hydronic pre-conditions. Set and enforce the pipework prerequisites that gate everything downstream: sectional and system pressure testing, chemical cleaning, flushing and passivation, laboratory sampling and water quality acceptance, and water balancing. Review test and balance reports against design schedules and specification tolerances.
• Controls and sequences. Review sequences of operation for commissionability; verify point-to-graphic completeness, controller and network redundancy, control loop tuning, and that tuned values are retained as defaults after power loss. Author the cooling side of L5 scenarios: response to power events, valve fail position and timing, rapid restart and locked-rotor amperage recovery, and capacity maintenance through failure conditions.
• Field support and escalation (≈20% of year one). Serve as the technical escalation point when a test fails, a control loop will not tune, or a vendor's result does not reconcile with the design. Review contractor methods of procedure for mechanical tie-ins and cutovers.
• Business development (≈10% of year one). Act as the technical voice on pursuits, scoping mechanical commissioning effort for proposals, presenting GMC's approach in interviews, and building the client and industry relationships that generate repeat work.
• Team development. Interview and hire mechanical commissioning staff; build the training curriculum with GMC's Training Administrator; mentor field staff toward independent test leadership. Hiring volume ramps as the practice wins work; expect to be building the team rather than managing a full one in year one.
• Travel. Roughly 30-50%, concentrated around test windows.

• Six or more years in mechanical commissioning, HVAC startup, test and balance, or controls, including at least three years on mission-critical facilities or high-density cooling.
• Demonstrated authorship, not just…