Senior Director, Data Center Engineering

The Senior Director, Data Center Engineering serves as the senior technical authority for the company’s data center design and development program. Reporting to the Vice President, Data Center Operations, this role owns the company’s standard data center design approach, leads the technical development of buildouts and expansions, and is accountable for reducing construction cost while protecting reliability, safety, maintainability, capacity, and customer requirements.

The role connects design strategy, development execution, construction economics, and long-term operations. It directs third-party design teams, partners with general contractors and internal stakeholders to generate value engineering opportunities, establishes design and acceptance requirements, and ensures that completed work can be safely operated, maintained, expanded, and supported over its lifecycle. Technical due diligence and feasibility analysis for potential acquisitions remain part of the role, but the primary focus is the company’s expected buildout and expansion program.

Role Scope and Interfaces

This position partners closely with the SVP of Development, Finance, Legal, Sales, Security, IT, Construction, third-party design firms, commissioning providers, general contractors, utilities, and site operations teams.

The Senior Director owns standard design, technical design quality, value engineering, cost-reduction recommendations, and operations readiness. The SVP of Development or assigned development leader retains accountability for the overall development program, commercial transaction, project delivery strategy, and construction execution unless otherwise delegated. The Senior Director is expected to challenge assumptions, define technical requirements, identify unacceptable risk, and provide clear recommendations to executive leadership.

Responsibilities:

Design Standards, Development, and Cost Leadership

• Own and continuously improve the company’s standard data center design, including repeatable electrical, mechanical, controls, architectural, structural, fire/life-safety, security, telecommunications, and operational design criteria.
• Translate operational requirements, customer commitments, reliability objectives, capacity assumptions, and lifecycle considerations into practical design standards and owner’s technical requirements.
• Own construction-cost reduction as a core performance objective. Establish cost-conscious design principles, benchmark project costs, identify cost drivers, and track the financial effect of design decisions from concept through closeout.
• Generate, evaluate, and prioritize value engineering ideas with internal design teams, third-party consultants, general contractors, equipment vendors, and site operations while protecting safety, reliability, maintainability, schedule, capacity, and customer commitments.
• Manage and oversee third-party design team(s), including scopes of work, deliverables, design schedules, technical quality, design coordination, fee and change control, and adherence to company standards.
• Establish design review gates and approval criteria that test effectiveness, efficiency, constructability, maintainability, energy performance, lifecycle cost, and operational impact before designs advance.
• Build a repeatable library of standard details, specifications, equipment selections, design assumptions, lessons learned, and approved alternatives to improve speed, consistency, and cost across future projects.

Buildout and Expansion Engineering Oversight

• Establish owner’s technical requirements and operational acceptance criteria for new builds, brownfield conversions, expansions, renovations, and major infrastructure replacements.
• Lead technical reviews at appropriate design and delivery stages, including concept, basis of design, schematic, detailed design, construction documents, bid packages, submittals, commissioning plans, and turnover packages.
• Perform or direct constructability, maintainability, resiliency, capacity, energy, safety, code, lifecycle, and operational impact reviews of electrical, mechanical, controls, civil, structural, fire protection, security, and telecommunications designs.
• Review proposed value engineering and changes for their effect on reliability, maintainability, customer commitments, future capacity, operating cost, safety, schedule, and lifecycle risk.
• Serve as an owner’s technical representative with consultants, contractors, commissioning agents, utilities, authorities having jurisdiction, and equipment vendors; escalate material deviations and unresolved risks.
• Review RFIs, submittals, change proposals, test plans, nonconformance reports, punch lists, and as-built documentation for technical completeness and operational acceptability.

Acquisition and Feasibility Technical Due Diligence

• Lead or direct the technical evaluation of prospective data center acquisitions, leases, conversions, and major capacity opportunities as needed to support investment decisions.
• Assess electrical infrastructure, utility service, medium- and low-voltage distribution, substations, switchgear, transformers, generators, UPS systems, batteries, PDUs, RPPs, grounding, protection, monitoring, and available mission-critical capacity.
• Assess mechanical and environmental systems, including chillers, cooling towers, dry coolers, CRAH/CRAC units, RTUs, pumps, heat rejection, controls, water use, containment, airflow, and high-density cooling capability.
• Evaluate resiliency, redundancy, maintainability, fault tolerance, failure modes, single points of failure, maintenance bypass capability, isolation strategies, and the practical ability to perform work without customer impact.
• Review site condition, equipment age, end-of-life exposure, vendor support, spare-parts availability, maintenance history, testing records, deferred maintenance, warranties, and known reliability events.
• Evaluate structural, civil, roof, raised-floor, loading, flood, seismic, environmental, fire/life-safety, physical security, telecommunications, and fiber considerations that may limit operations or future expansion.
• Validate current and future capacity using utility commitments, one-line diagrams, equipment ratings, operating limits, customer commitments, internal loads, cooling capacity, and realistic deployment assumptions.
• Develop a technical risk register, high-level capital and operating cost implications, remediation priorities, expansion constraints, and a written proceed, proceed-with-conditions, or do-not-proceed recommendation.

Commissioning, Turnover, and Operational Readiness

• Define commissioning and integrated systems testing expectations for critical electrical, mechanical, controls, fire/life-safety, and monitoring systems.
• Coordinate with commissioning providers, NETA testing firms, arc-flash and protection-coordination engineers, equipment manufacturers, and operations personnel to ensure testing is complete, witnessed, documented, and actionable.
• Verify that SOPs, MOPs, EOPs, preventive maintenance requirements, emergency contacts, training, spare parts, security procedures, monitoring points, labels, one-lines, sequences of operation, and as-built drawings are complete before acceptance.
• Establish technical conditions for substantial completion, beneficial use, customer deployment, and final operational acceptance.
• Support warranty administration, defect tracking, root-cause analysis, and post-occupancy performance reviews.

Portfolio Engineering and Existing Site Support

• Provide engineering leadership for infrastructure lifecycle planning, end-of-life replacement, modernization, reliability improvement, and risk reduction across the existing portfolio.
• Maintain or govern engineering standards, design criteria, capacity models, one-line diagrams, equipment inventories, criticality classifications, and technical documentation.
• Support capacity planning and oversubscription decisions by connecting customer commitments, actual load, cooling limitations, utility capacity, internal loads, and expansion plans.
• Identify constraints that affect new customer intake, existing customer growth, maintenance windows, redundancy posture, or site closure and migration decisions.
• Participate in incident reviews, failure investigations, reliability programs, and lessons-learned processes for events affecting critical infrastructure or customer service.

Governance, Standards, and Risk Management

• Govern the company’s standard design, technical diligence, design review, commissioning, acceptance, and handoff processes so they can be applied consistently across multiple sites and project types.
• Maintain design-cost benchmarks, approved alternatives, value engineering logs, and lessons learned to support continuous reduction of build costs.
• Maintain a portfolio-level technical risk register and communicate risk in business terms, including customer impact, probability, consequence, remediation cost, schedule exposure, and residual risk.
• Ensure engineering recommendations are consistent with applicable laws, codes, permits, utility requirements, safety requirements, company standards, customer commitments, and approved design criteria.
• Promote safe work practices, disciplined change control, documented approvals, and clear accountability for technical decisions.

Decision Rights and Expected Deliverables:

Area

Expected ownership or output

Standard design and cost

Company design standards, cost benchmarks, value engineering pipeline, and approval of material technical deviations.

Acquisition diligence

Technical findings, risk register, capacity validation, remediation estimate, and executive recommendation.

Design authority

Technical requirements, review comments, deviations, and acceptance criteria for critical infrastructure.

Operational acceptance

Recommendation to accept, conditionally accept, or reject systems that are not complete, tested, documented, or maintainable.

Executive reporting

Clear decisions and escalations supported by facts, financial implications, customer impact, and residual risk.

Portfolio improvement

Lifecycle plans, modernization priorities, reliability initiatives, and repeatable engineering standards.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, architectural engineering, construction management, facilities engineering, or a related technical discipline; equivalent experience may be considered.
• Typically 10 or more years of progressive experience in data center engineering, mission-critical facilities, critical infrastructure, construction oversight, commissioning, technical due diligence, or a closely related field.
• Demonstrated experience evaluating or delivering data center electrical and mechanical infrastructure, preferably across multiple facilities or geographies.
• Strong working knowledge of critical power systems, cooling systems, controls, fire/life safety, physical infrastructure, monitoring, and data center operating practices.
• Experience reading and interpreting electrical one-lines, protection and control diagrams, mechanical plans, sequences of operation, specifications, commissioning scripts, test reports, and as-built documentation.
• Experience leading consultants, contractors, commissioning providers, vendors, and cross-functional stakeholders while maintaining technical accountability for the outcome.
• Demonstrated experience managing third-party engineering and design firms, coordinating multidisciplinary design deliverables, and holding design teams accountable for quality, schedule, and cost.
• Demonstrated experience with value engineering, cost benchmarking, construction-cost reduction, or lifecycle cost optimization for data center or other mission-critical projects.
• Ability to translate complex engineering conditions into concise executive recommendations, investment risks, project decisions, and operational requirements.
• Ability to travel regularly to existing and prospective facilities and construction sites.

Preferred Qualifications

• Professional Engineer license, Certified Energy Manager, Certified Data Centre Professional, or comparable credential.
• Experience with acquisition, lease, facility conversion, or technical diligence processes involving critical environments.
• Experience establishing standard designs, master specifications, repeatable design details, or portfolio-wide engineering standards.
• Experience partnering with general contractors and design firms to identify and implement value engineering opportunities.
• Experience with high-density compute, liquid cooling, advanced power distribution, or other emerging data center technologies.
• Experience with data center capacity modeling, lifecycle cost analysis, capital planning, utility coordination, or portfolio optimization.
• Experience with CMMS, DCIM, BMS, EPMS, asset management, drawing management, or other infrastructure information systems.
• Experience working with national or international portfolios and differing local code, utility, and authority-having-jurisdiction requirements.

Technical Knowledge and Industry Alignment

The successful candidate should be able to apply engineering judgment and coordinate qualified specialists across the following domains:

• Electrical: utility service, MV/LV distribution, switchgear, transformers, generators, UPS, batteries, PDUs, RPPs, grounding, protection, testing, monitoring, and power quality.
• Mechanical: cooling generation and distribution, heat rejection, CRAH/CRAC, chillers, RTUs, pumps, airflow, containment, controls, water, environmental conditions, and high-density deployment limits.
• Reliability: redundancy, concurrent maintainability, fault tolerance, failure modes, single points of failure, bypass/isolation strategies, testing, and recovery practices.
• Safety and compliance: NEC/NFPA 70, NFPA 70E, fire and life-safety requirements, OSHA requirements, building and energy codes, local AHJ requirements, and permit conditions.
• Data center design and operations: ANSI/BICSI 002 concepts, ASHRAE thermal guidance, commissioning and integrated systems testing, operating procedures, maintenance strategies, and lifecycle planning.

The role is not expected to personally perform every specialty analysis. It is expected to know when qualified specialists are required, define the questions they must answer, challenge assumptions, integrate the findings, and make a sound operational recommendation.

Leadership Competencies

• Technical judgment: makes practical, evidence-based decisions in environments where reliability, safety, cost, schedule, and customer impact are interconnected.
• Executive communication: communicates risk, tradeoffs, and recommendations clearly to technical and nontechnical leaders.
• Ownership: follows issues through discovery, decision, remediation, verification, and long-term operating acceptance.
• Constructive challenge: respectfully challenges incomplete designs, optimistic assumptions, weak documentation, and solutions that create future operational risk.
• Collaboration: builds effective working relationships with Development, Operations, Finance, Sales, Security, IT, Legal, contractors, consultants, and customers.
• Standardization: creates repeatable processes and raises consistency across a varied portfolio without ignoring site-specific constraints.
• Talent development: develops internal technical capability and improves the quality of engineering decisions made throughout the organization.

Measures of Success

• The company’s standard design is clearly documented, consistently applied, and continuously improved based on cost, reliability, constructability, maintainability, and operating experience.
• Build costs are reduced through disciplined design decisions, competitive technical requirements, repeatable solutions, and a sustained value engineering pipeline.
• Third-party design teams deliver effective, efficient, coordinated, and constructible designs that meet company standards and project requirements.
• Acquisition and lease decisions are supported by consistent, fact-based technical diligence and clearly documented residual risks.
• Buildouts and expansions meet defined technical, safety, reliability, capacity, documentation, and operational acceptance requirements.
• Major technical risks, lifecycle liabilities, and capacity constraints are identified early enough to influence investment and design decisions.
• Commissioning, integrated systems testing, turnover, and warranty processes produce facilities that Operations can safely operate and maintain.
• Engineering standards, review gates, risk registers, capacity models, and handoff practices are consistently applied across the portfolio.
• The organization experiences fewer avoidable technical surprises, clearer accountability, better lifecycle decisions, and stronger alignment between Development and Operations.