Title: Software Engineer - Data Center Emulator
Location: On-site, Santa Clara, CA
Overview
seeking an experienced contract software engineer to design and build a web-based data center emulation platform. This system will serve as a shared infrastructure for development, testing, and demonstration purposes across multiple engineering teams. The engagement is an initial 3-month term with the possibility of extension based on delivery.
The emulator must be capable of representing a complete data center environment, including power distribution, cooling, and compute infrastructure. It must support configurable scenarios, produce realistic physics-based simulation output, and operate as a production-grade webservice.
This is not a prototyping exercise. The contractor will be expected to deliver working, maintainable software that other engineers can build on immediately.
What You Will Build
The emulator is a web-based service that does two things. First, it produces bulk telemetry data exports that downstream systems can consume for development and testing. Second, it actively simulates the network behaviour of physical data center devices, speaking the protocols those devices use on real infrastructure. Both modes must reflect realistic operational behaviour, including normal operating states, degraded conditions, and configurable fault scenarios.
The simulation must be grounded in physical modelling. Power loads, thermal behaviour, and equipment interactions should reflect real-world constraints rather than synthetic approximations.
Required Qualifications
8 or more years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong record of delivering complex systems end to end.
Deep expertise in software design and architecture. This role involves substantial use of AI-assisted development tooling, and success depends on the ability to produce precise, unambiguous specifications that can be implemented reliably and verified against clear acceptance criteria.
Strong Python development skills. The emulator will be built primarily in Python and must be structured for maintainability and extensibility from the start.
Demonstrated experience implementing or simulating industrial device protocols, specifically Modbus, BACnet, and OPC-UA. The contractor must be able to build services that speak these protocols accurately enough to serve as credible stand-ins for physical equipment.
Experience building web-based services and APIs, including considerations for performance under concurrent load from multiple consuming systems.
Familiarity with physics-based simulation or numerical modelling in the context of building systems, power systems, or thermal environments.
Preferred Qualifications
Experience with Energy Plus or Spawn of Energy Plus for building energy simulation.
Background in data center infrastructure, including power distribution architecture, cooling system design, or DCIM concepts.
Experience with additional OT protocols such as MQTT/Sparkplug-B or DNP3.
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