Data Center Architect

TLDR ; Davis is looking for an architect who has already run data center feasibility studies on their own, and who can answer the question a client asks in front of a site: how many megawatts can this land absorb. We expect three to five years on the data center product, with two or three projects seen end to end.

About Davis
Davis is an AI-native real estate company accelerating early-stage development and architectural design. Today developers coordinate 4-5 fragmented stakeholders over weeks or months. Soon they'll need only one: Davis.
We turn every input that shapes a development decision into decision-ready outputs: investor-grade feasibility studies, investment analysis, and architect-certified designs, delivered in days. Every stage pairs our proprietary AI systems with expert review , so velocity never comes at the cost of reliability.
We closed a $5.5M pre-seed co-led by Heartcore Capital and Balderton Capital , with Yellow, Evantic and Entrepreneur First, alongside angels from the founding teams of Spacemaker, Black Forest Labs, Hugging Face, Supabase, Cleo and Spore Bio. We already work with leading developers and expect to support hundreds of projects over the coming year, deepening our research, our hiring, and our coverage of the development process end to end.

The Role
The data center market is structuring fast, operators and landowners are hunting for sites, and the question they ask is one of capacity: how many megawatts of IT load does this land carry, under what scheme, and on what conditions. We answer in days where the market takes weeks. You will be the person who answers for that number.
You will run a portfolio of test fits and data center feasibility studies, with occasional work on large logistics and industry. Under the supervision of a lead architect, you take these projects from first capacity through to schematic design, and you present them to the client.

The core of the role

• Establish a site's capacity in IT megawatts, working from the local zoning rules and operating constraints, and set out the assumptions behind it.

• Qualify the applicable land-use category and the environmental-classification regime for industrial facilities, and derive from them the permitted height, the setbacks and the siting conditions.

• Draw the data halls at their real grid, fully laid out, with their aisles, their air-handling units and their structural grid.

• Compose the industrial site plan: service yards, a perimeter heavy-vehicle road, loading docks, retention basins, planted buffers, access and parking.

• Arbitrate between schemes, one level, two levels or more, while respecting the slab-to-slab height and the zoning height cap.

• Name the questions to put to the operator: cooling system, density per rack, electrical redundancy, hall dimensions, height.

• Carry your number in front of the client, and defend it under challenge.

• Place the project on its critical path: grid connection, environmental permitting, ecological surveys, preventive archaeology.

Contribute to the technology

• Formalize data center best practice, translating the sizing cascade, the grids and the thresholds into criteria our AI teams can use.

• Qualify the model's outputs, saying what is right, what is wrong, and on what grounds.

• Work across the product, tech and real estate teams, inside the tool's continuous-improvement cycles.

Work as a team

• Take part in project reviews and exchange with the other architects to improve the methods and the quality of the deliverables.

• Contribute to the team's graphic standards.

What We’re Looking For

• Education : a degree in architecture.

• Experience : we count projects as much as years. Three to five years on the data center product, with two or three projects seen across their full cycle. One of them should be a project you carried yourself, from capacity through to permit or schematic design. A background in large logistics or industrial buildings is a valid base, provided you add that data center experience to it.

• Software : mastery of Rhino and Revit is essential, and AutoCAD is expected.

• Appetite for digital tools and AI : you do not need to code, but the drive to fold these tools into your practice and push it forward is essential.

• Speed and synthesis : our clients decide fast, on a number. You need to produce a credible, well-drawn scenario in hours, cut to the essential on ambiguous cases, and know what level of detail serves the decision at each phase.

Domain skills

• Product knowledge , the sizing cascade of a data center, hall, power, cooling, telecom and logistics, the slab-to-slab height and what it imposes, the rack-and-aisle grid, electrical redundancy, the order of magnitude of a PUE.

• Applied regulatory fluency , the land-use sub-category and the 2023 ruling that reclassified data centers, the environmental-classification headings and the threshold that triggers a full environmental permit, height and setback rules, no-net-land-take targets and designation as a project of major national interest, rooftop renewable-energy requirements.

• Buildable capacity , linking a rule to its quantified effect on a volume, and a volume to an installable power.

• Industrial site planning , heavy-vehicle access, turning circles, fire safety, water management, insertion and edges.

• Graphic production , plans, sections and diagrams that make a capacity argument legible to an investor.

• Ownership of the subject , presenting, arguing and defending a number in front of a client who contests it. We are looking for someone who has owned the subject end to end, assumptions, number and client presentation.

Complementary skills

• Rigor and a sense of synthesis, especially on ambiguous cases.

• Structuring information, organizing what you produce so that others, human or machine, can use it.…

Source: Arbeitnow (https://www.arbeitnow.fr/jobs/companies/meetdavis/data-center-architect-paris-111857)