Whitespace Engineer

What This Role Actually Is The owner of the data hall design. Rack elevations, row layouts, power and cooling budgets per rack, and the space plan for the next GPU generation are yours to design and defend. The owner of the cable plant. Structured fiber and copper, Infini Band and Ethernet runs, labeling, and the documentation that lets anyone trace a link from port to port.

The bridge between facilities and compute.

You speak to the electrical and mechanical teams in their terms and to HPC engineers in theirs, and you catch the mismatch before it is built. The person who signs off the hall before it goes live. Nothing is handed to HPC Engineering until power, cooling, and cabling are installed, tested, and documented. A hands‑on engineer. You are on the floor during deployments, not only in the drawing set.

Every rack placed against a power, cooling, and cabling budget that holds. Design rack and row layouts, elevations, and floor plans for high‑density GPU deployments (NVIDIA HGX and rack‑scale systems). Maintain per‑rack and per‑row power and cooling budgets, and plan space and capacity for upcoming GPU generations. Review vendor and integrator drawings and catch conflicts between rack, power, cooling, and cable pathways before installation.

Keep the hall's source of truth current in DCIM and Net Box: racks, devices, power feeds, and cable connections.

From the busway tap to the server power supply. Specify and verify rack power: overhead busway and tap‑offs, rack PDUs, A/B redundancy, and phase balancing. Validate load against design during deployment and flag any rack running outside its budget. Coordinate with Facilities on circuits, breakers, and maintenance windows that touch live racks.

High‑density racks are cooled by design, not by luck. Support deployment and commissioning of liquid cooling: direct‑to‑chip loops, CDUs, manifolds, quick disconnects, and rear‑door heat exchangers. Plan containment and airflow for air‑cooled and hybrid rows. Work with Facilities on leak detection, coolant quality, and thermal monitoring, and own the white‑space side of every cooling incident.

Every link labeled, tested, and traceable. Design and oversee structured cabling for Infini Band, RoCE, and Ethernet fabrics: fiber trunks, MPO/MTP, AOCs and DACs, patch panels, and cable pathways. Set the cabling standard (labeling, routing, bend radius, slack) and hold contractors and integrators to it. Run or verify cable certification and optical testing, and hand HPC Engineering a cable plant with documented results.

Racks land on schedule and go live clean. Lead white‑space readiness for new halls and expansions: receiving, rack‑and‑stack, cabling, power‑on, and handover. Write and run commissioning checklists for power, cooling, and cabling, and sign off before handover to HPC Engineering. Direct contractors, integrators, and on‑site technicians on the floor, and resolve installation issues on the spot.

Make the next hall faster and cleaner than the last. Support incidents with a physical‑layer cause: failed links, PDU faults, cooling alarms, and hot spots. Track recurring physical‑layer problems and fix the standard, not just the instance. Use AI tools to draft documentation, checklists, and analysis, and verify every output against the floor and the source systems before it is used.

Five or more years in data center engineering, critical infrastructure, or deployment roles, with hands‑on ownership of data hall white space. Experience designing and deploying…