{"id":2001619,"url":"https://alion.io/job/volta-head-of-project-engineering","title":"Head of Project Engineering","company":{"id":3862918,"name":"Volta","domain":"volta.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/volta-7","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":null},"role":"Product","role_family":"Product","seniority":"head","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Palo Alto, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":225000,"max":330000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":330000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Platform Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"SLI/SLO/SLA","optional":false},{"name":"GDPR","optional":true},{"name":"HPC","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-07-29T13:43:29Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-07-29","last_verified_at":"2026-10-13T19:58:38Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":76,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":76},"description":"About Volta\nVolta is the category-defining, fully vertically integrated AI infrastructure platform - from capital to clusters to software, under a founder-led enterprise. Our mission is The Utility of Compute™: AI infrastructure as dependable and available as electricity, for every organization that needs it. Launched with a $10B strategic partnership with one of the leading frontier AI labs, a Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, and a $5B AI Infrastructure Fund, Volta is building the infrastructure layer of the AI era from the ground up. We are 100+ people across London, Palo Alto, and New York, with rapid growth expectations to hundreds.\nAbout The Role\nVolta builds and operates large scale GPU compute infrastructure for frontier AI customers. Every deployment is a project: a site, a customer, a hardware generation, a power and cooling envelope, a network fabric, and a date the cluster has to be producing useful work.\nOur project teams own those deployments end to end. Each is roughly five senior engineers spanning data center operations, network engineering, and systems and platform engineering. They join during the discovery phase of a deal, when the technical shape and the commitments are still being formed, and stay with the project until the cluster is handed over to steady state operations.\nAs Head of Project Engineering you own that function. You lead multiple project teams delivering concurrently across sites, you are accountable for what Volta commits to technically during deal discovery and for whether we then deliver it, and you own the standard by which a cluster is declared done.\nThis is a leadership role with deep technical substance. You will not be running these deployments from a spreadsheet.\nWhat You Will Be Doing\nDeal Discovery and Commitments\nOwn technical input into deals from the discovery phase: site feasibility, power and cooling envelope, hardware and fabric options, deployment sequencing, and what is realistic on what timeline.\n\nPressure test what is being committed before it is signed. You are the person who says a date is not achievable while that is still cheap to hear.\n\nContribute the technical basis for cost models, bills of materials, and capacity assumptions, and make the assumptions explicit so they can be revisited when reality moves.\n\nSupport customer technical due diligence and, where relevant, lender or investor technical review.\n\nProject Delivery\nHold accountability for delivery across a portfolio of concurrent deployments: scope, technical quality, and readiness against the committed date.\n\nEstablish the delivery model each project team follows, from facility handover through rack and stack, power on, fabric build, and burn-in to acceptance.\n\nOwn escalation. When a project is off track, you are the one who diagnoses whether it is a supply problem, a facility problem, a design problem, or a team problem, and who resolves it.\n\nAllocate people across projects and manage the reality that senior specialists are scarce and demand is lumpy.\n\nOwn risk across the portfolio, including the dependencies that sit outside Volta.\n\nHandover to Steady State Operations\nDefine and enforce what \"done\" means: acceptance criteria, performance validation, documentation, runbook completeness, monitoring coverage, and operational readiness.\n\nOwn the handover to steady state operations as a controlled transition with an agreed definition of complete, not a gradual disengagement.\n\nMake sure the operational and SLA commitments Volta has made are actually supportable by what the project team leaves behind.\n\nClose the loop back into engineering: what went wrong, what was manual that should not have been, and what needs to change in the platform or the process before the next site.\n\nOrganization and People\nBuild and lead the project engineering function: team leads, project engineers, and the senior specialists who make up the teams.\n\nHire senior technical people into a role that requires travel, ambiguity, and site presence, and be honest with candidates about what that involves.\n\nRun the management basics properly: 1:1s, performance conversations, development, and succession for a function where key person risk is real.\n\nEstablish a career path for project engineers so that the role is a destination rather than a rotation people try to leave.\n\nPartners and Vendors\nOwn the technical relationship with OEMs and integration partners through delivery, including holding them to their commitments.\n\nWork with facility and colocation partners on demarcation, handover, and the boundaries of who owns what physically and operationally.\n\nManage partner-delivered scope where deployments use external field services or managed services capacity.\n\nStandards and Repeatability\nTurn deployments from bespoke projects into a repeatable process. The second site should be materially easier than the first, and the fifth should not need you in the room.\n\nOwn the reference deployment model, standard acceptance test suites, and the documentation set every project produces.\n\nWork with platform and network engineering so that what the project teams do by hand today becomes automated tomorrow.\n\nWhat You Bring\n8+ years in data center, infrastructure, or large scale technical delivery, with at least 3 years leading multiple teams or leading through team leads.\n\nTrack record delivering large scale compute deployments end to end, at a scale where power, cooling, and logistics are constraints rather than details.\n\nReal technical depth in at least two of: data center facilities and power and cooling, high performance network fabric, or compute and systems engineering. Enough credibility in the others to lead senior specialists who know more than you do about their own area.\n\nFamiliarity with GPU cluster deployment: rack scale systems, high density power, liquid cooling, and the acceptance and validation work that proves a cluster is fit for training workloads.\n\nExperience owning delivery against commercial commitments, where dates and acceptance criteria have contractual and financial consequences.\n\nMulti-vendor OEM and partner management under delivery pressure, including holding vendors to schedule and quality without breaking the relationship.\n\nExperience running concurrent projects with shared, constrained specialist resource.\n\nComfortable in commercial conversations: contributing to deal shaping, feasibility, and cost basis, and translating technical constraints for commercial and customer audiences.\n\nWilling and able to travel to sites and partner locations regularly, including during critical delivery phases.\n\nClear communicator who can hold an uncomfortable position with senior stakeholders and customers when the technical reality requires it.\n\nFluency with AI-assisted workflows for planning, documentation, and reporting.\n\nNice to Have (But Not Essential)\nNone of these are required.\nExperience with NVIDIA reference architectures and rack scale systems, and with the certification and validation process that comes with them.\n\nDirect liquid cooling deployment experience, including CDU integration and facility demarcation.\n\nBackground at a neocloud, hyperscaler, HPC center, or specialist data center integrator.\n\nExperience deploying in the Nordics or in sites with unusual power, climate, or grid characteristics.\n\nExposure to technical due diligence for lenders or investors on infrastructure projects.\n\nFamiliarity with structured delivery frameworks, and a clear view on where they add value and where they become overhead.\n\nExperience introducing automation or tooling into a delivery function that previously ran on people and spreadsheets.\nREQ-89\n\nWhat We Offer\nAt Volta, we believe people do their best work when they feel supported, trusted and able to grow. We're building a company where you can make an impact, keep a healthy balance between work and life, and build a career you're proud of. \nAs a global team, we do our best to provide great benefits wherever you're based. While some benefits vary by country due to local regulations, we believe looking after our people is simply the right thing to do.\nCompetitive salary based on the work you do here, not your previous salary\n\nEquity in Volta, giving you the opportunity to share in the company's long-term success\n\nRetirement/pension contributions\n\nComprehensive health, wellbeing and insurance benefits\n\nGenerous number of vacation days each year\n\nAdditional Information\nBackground Checks\nAll offers of employment at Volta are conditional on the satisfactory completion of pre-employment screening, which includes confirmation of your right to work, verification of your employment history and a criminal record check, where this is permitted by local law. Screening is carried out by Zinc, an accredited third-party provider, after an offer is made and all information is handled confidentially and in accordance with applicable data protection law.\nEqual Opportunity\nVolta is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team and make employment decisions based on skills, qualifications, experience and business needs. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, veteran status or any other legally protected characteristic.\nAccessibility\nVolta is committed to providing an accessible recruitment experience for all candidates. If you require accommodations or adjustments at any stage of the application or interview process, please contact us at . We will work with you to identify reasonable accommodations that enable you to participate fully in the hiring process.\nCandidate Privacy Notice\nBy applying, you consent to the processing of your personal data for recruitment purposes in accordance with applicable data protection laws, including the UK GDPR, EU GDPR and relevant US state privacy regulations. Your data will be shared only with those involved in the hiring process and will not be used for unrelated purposes. For details, see our Recruitment & Candidate Privacy Notice.\nNote to Recruitment Agencies\nVolta does not accept unsolicited CVs or candidate profiles from recruitment agencies. Any unsolicited submissions, including those sent directly to hiring managers or employees, will be treated as the property of Volta. 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