Senior Director of Operations, Critical Infrastructure
United States
Full Time
Experienced
Senior Director of Operations, Critical Infrastructure
Job Summary
The Senior Director of Operations, is accountable for the overall reliability, safety, and performance of on-site power generation and critical infrastructure systems across multiple U.S. data center campuses or a large, complex campus. This role sets operational strategy and standards while ensuring disciplined execution that protects compute load and delivers sustained high availability.
The Senior Director leads Directors and senior operations leaders, owns portfolio-level risk management, and partners with Engineering, Construction, Training, and Vendor Management to ensure operability, maintainability, and resilience are embedded across current operations and future growth. This role serves as the highest operational escalation point for critical infrastructure events.
Key Responsibilities
Job Summary
The Senior Director of Operations, is accountable for the overall reliability, safety, and performance of on-site power generation and critical infrastructure systems across multiple U.S. data center campuses or a large, complex campus. This role sets operational strategy and standards while ensuring disciplined execution that protects compute load and delivers sustained high availability.
The Senior Director leads Directors and senior operations leaders, owns portfolio-level risk management, and partners with Engineering, Construction, Training, and Vendor Management to ensure operability, maintainability, and resilience are embedded across current operations and future growth. This role serves as the highest operational escalation point for critical infrastructure events.
Key Responsibilities
- Provide executive leadership for multi-campus critical infrastructure operations, including electrical distribution, on-site power generation, UPS, switchgear, cooling systems, and life safety systems.
- Establish and govern enterprise standards for MOPs, SOPs, and EOPs, ensuring consistent execution during load transfers, ramp-rate events, and abnormal operating conditions.
- Own portfolio-level operational readiness, maintenance strategy, and incident management across all assigned campuses.
- Lead and develop a leadership bench of Directors, Senior Managers, and site operations leaders; drive accountability, succession planning, and talent development.
- Serve as the executive escalation point for high-severity infrastructure incidents, ensuring rapid resolution, high-quality root cause analysis, and corrective action closure.
- Define, monitor, and act on portfolio-wide KPIs related to availability, reliability, safety, maintenance effectiveness, and operational maturity.
- Provide governance and strategic oversight of vendor relationships and power plant operating agreements to ensure reliability, safety, and performance outcomes.
- Partner with Engineering and Construction leadership to influence design standards and ensure operability and maintainability are incorporated into new builds, expansions, and retrofits.
- Proactively identify systemic operational risks and drive mitigation strategies across the portfolio.
- Champion a strong culture of safety, compliance, and continuous improvement aligned with regulatory and corporate standards.
- 15+ years of experience in mission-critical operations, data centers, power generation, or utility environments.
- 7+ years of experience leading leaders across multiple sites or large-scale critical infrastructure operations.
- Deep expertise in MEP systems supporting high-availability data center environments.
- Demonstrated success establishing operational standards, governance, and risk management at scale.
- Executive-level communication, decision-making, and crisis leadership capabilities.
- Professional Engineering (PE) license or equivalent certification.
- Experience with regulatory compliance and oversight (OSHA, EPA, NERC/FERC exposure).
- Strong familiarity with CMMS, BMS, EPMS, SCADA, and power monitoring platforms.
Location
- Areas for these are currently, Abilene (sites 1 & 2), New Mexico, Wisconsin, Chicago IL.
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