Controls Engineer, R&D - Thermofluids & Rotating Machinery Metric Search has been retained by a rapidly scaling AI infrastructure company to find a Controls Engineer for its Thermofluids R&D team. Our client is building and operating compute capacity at a scale the cooling industry has never had to deliver, and rather than wait on a vendor base that can't keep up, they are taking compressor and chiller design in-house: new machine architectures, from blank sheet to production, built thousands of times over. What you'll own
- The control architecture for a new chiller and its test rigs, spanning the compressor, motor drive, expansion turbine and the loop around them.
- Safety interlocks and fault handling for a machine whose working fluid can cross its critical point within the normal operating range.
- Capacity control through motor and turbine speed rather than throttling valves, keeping the process fluid path valve-free at the design point.
- Hardware-in-the-loop validation of the full control system, proving every interlock fires before it touches real hardware.
- Taking the controls from the test cell into the production chiller, including integration with site BMS and the wider plant. What we're looking for
- You've written control logic for rotating machinery and commissioned it on a live machine.
- You've designed interlocks where a fault means destroyed hardware or an injured person, and can justify each one from first principles.
- You've run HIL testing that caught something real before commissioning.
- You've tuned loops on a live plant and worked out why the model and the hardware disagreed.
- You've handed a control system to people who didn't write it, with documentation they could use at 3am. Nice to have: propulsion or vehicle test controls (engine sequencing, abort and safing logic); variable-speed drives and high-speed motor control (VFDs, magnetic bearing controllers); refrigeration and chiller control (superheat, head pressure, capacity staging); Beckhoff, Siemens, Allen-Bradley or CODESYS; model-based development and HIL (Simulink, dSPACE, NI VeriStand). Why this role
- Genuine first-of-its-kind engineering: nobody sells the machine you'll be controlling.
- Whatever you land gets deployed at fleet scale, not left in a lab.
- Small, senior, high-autonomy team with a clear mandate and real urgency.
- Hybrid working from New York Interested, or know someone who would be? Message me directly or email jessica.cohen@metric-search.com for a confidential conversation. All enquiries are treated in strict confidence.