Software Engineer - Data Center Emulator
Location: On-site, Santa Clara, CA
Overview
seeking an experienced contract software engineer to designand build a web-based data center emulation platform. This system will serve as a sharedinfrastructure for development, testing, and demonstration purposes across multipleengineering teams. The engagement is an initial 3-month term with the possibility of extensionbased on delivery.
The emulator must be capable of representing a complete data center environment, includingpower 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 dataexports that downstream systems can consume for development and testing. Second, it activelysimulates the network behavior of physical data center devices, speaking the protocols thosedevices use on real infrastructure. Both modes must reflect realistic operational behavior,including normal operating states, degraded conditions, and configurable fault scenarios.
- The simulation must be grounded in physical modeling. Power loads, thermal behavior, andequipment interactions should reflect real-world constraints rather than syntheticapproximations.
Required Qualifications
- 8 or more years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong record ofdelivering 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 clearacceptance criteria.
- Strong Python development skills. The emulator will be built primarily in Python and mustbe 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 servicesthat speak these protocols accurately enough to serve as credible stand-ins for physicalequipment.
- Experience building web-based services and APIs, including considerations forperformance under concurrent load from multiple consuming systems.
- Familiarity with physics-based simulation or numerical modeling in the context of buildingsystems, power systems, or thermal environments.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with EnergyPlus or Spawn of EnergyPlus 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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