Design Engineer - Built World

About Build

AI for the Built World: Build has created the agentic AI stack for institutional real estate, automating complex development and acquisitions workflows 90% faster than humans to accelerate the world's most important built projects - digital infrastructure, energy, industrial - from concept to completion.

Our mission is to accelerate and amplify the world's most important built projects - inventing a better way to build through a collaboration between human experts and agentic AI. We envision a future where the world's buildings are driven from concept to completion, autonomously. Without delays, cost, and complexity. Enabling people to deliver a magnitude more deals. To make decisions, build relationships and create.

To start, we're partnering with the world's biggest built world institutions from $T alternative assets investors, prolific developers and even governments to push the frontier of what's possible. We're backed by c-suite from Blackstone and OpenAI alongside the world's best venture capital firms.

Join us in shaping the future of the Built World and exponentially accelerate your career in the process. We welcome you to do your life's work here.

About the role

This role exists to make sure Build designs the way the best engineers do. The Design Engineer brings an engineering lens to data centers, power and energy infrastructure, and the wider built environment, and takes projects through design: from concept and feasibility to a coordinated, buildable scheme.

You are the source of truth for how a project actually gets engineered when the loads are large, the timelines are tight and the stakes are high.

You can expect to:

Take live projects through design: site and capacity studies, concept design, MEP, electrical and mechanical systems, and critical facilities design.

Size and lay out power, cooling and resilience systems for data centers and energy infrastructure, and pressure-test them against cost, schedule and constructability.

Work alongside Build's domain experts and engineers to turn design judgment into workflows, rules and checks that can be encoded into software.

Run proofs-of-concept for new design workflows by doing the work yourself, with an engineer supporting you on Build's systems.

Own design quality from an engineering perspective. If an output wouldn't survive review by a serious design firm, it's your job to surface and fix it.

Act as a credible peer to developers, operators, utilities and design consultants, speaking their language.

Feed what you learn on projects back into the core product.

What we're looking for

• Hands-on design experience on data centers, mission-critical facilities, or power and energy infrastructure.
• Strong grounding in MEP: electrical distribution, mechanical and cooling systems, redundancy (N+1, 2N) and critical facilities design.
• Experience at a leading engineering or design firm (e.g. Arup, Jacobs, Burns & McDonnell, Corgan, HDR, Syska Hennessy), or on a hyperscaler or colocation design team.
• Taken projects from concept through detailed design, coordinating across disciplines and with contractors.
• Comfortable with numbers and tools: load calcs, single-line diagrams, BIM/Revit, and spreadsheets or scripts to move fast.
• Bias to ownership and speed. You'd rather ship a working answer today than a perfect one next month.
• Nice to haves
• PE licence (or on track), or chartered engineer status.
• Exposure to utility interconnection, on-site generation, BESS or grid-scale energy projects.
• Experience with design automation, generative design, or scripting (Python, Dynamo, Grasshopper).
• A degree in mechanical, electrical or civil engineering, or architectural engineering.
• How to win at Build
• Growing Build requires a radically different approach to company building. As a company we're focused on one outcome: winning. That means we move fast, work with intensity, and demand excellence from ourselves. We operate with intensity but create an environment that allows for a lot of fun together. The result is that we're one of the fastest shipping teams in vertical AI, partnering with the best to automate the world around us.
• Performance and teamwork are the core of Build's operation. We look for those who are able to do both, who often exhibit a particular ability for; Velocity: You are relentless in asking the right questions to set direction. Once you find the right direction you go all-in.
• Excellence: You obsess with being the best. For you, excellence is a non-negotiable standard rather than an aspiration.
• Long time horizons: You choose to be in something for the long run, because that's where most of the returns are realized.
• Ownership: You take full ownership of the outcomes. You're meticulous in your pursuits and believe you can actively shape your environment rather than adapt to it.
• Customers: You have a passion for the built world and those who shape it. You probably have a quirky hobby or story that relates to your love for building.
• Integrity: You chose to do the right thing even when it isn't easy.
• Trust: You only work with people you can trust because it's the only way to do truly extraordinary things.
• Yield: You have a burning need to see a result on every action you take and you're always looking for routes to do more with less.

What we offer

Radical autonomy, real ownership: High standards. Minimal bureaucracy. You own problems end-to-end, choose how the work gets done, and are accountable for exceptional outcomes. Ownership is matched with meaningful, generous equity.

An accelerated founder's track: Build is for builders. If you want to learn what it actually takes to create a generational company - Product judgment, execution speed, and accountability - there is no faster path than building from zero when everything is for grabs.

Elite teammates, uncompromising bar: You work with people who think clearly, execute relentlessly, and take full ownership. The team you build becomes the company you build. Growth here is not just professional; it reshapes how you operate and in return how Build operates.

Perpetual adventure: We attract the strongest of the strange. Extraordinary experiences are part of the culture - from the food we eat together to the space we occupy. Intensity is intentional.

Shape the built world: We are rebuilding how the physical world gets made. Our software doesn't live in the abstract - it turns into real projects breaking ground because we exist. We work with the largest institutions, push the frontier of AI, and watch our decisions translate directly into the world around us.