A proven owner of complex technical projects. Five or more years running technical programs where you were genuinely accountable for the outcome, not just the tracker. You have delivered projects with hardware, facilities, or physical-world dependencies, where a slip has consequences you cannot recover with a hotfix.
Datacenter or critical infrastructure fluency. You understand how a datacenter actually works: power chain, cooling topology, airflow and thermal management, PUE and its limits as a metric, BMS and DCIM systems, capacity and commissioning. You can hold a technical conversation with a facility engineer and be taken seriously. Direct experience in colocation, hyperscale, HPC, or mission-critical facilities is strongly preferred.
Customer ownership at the technical level. You have been the face of a technical delivery to a demanding customer and kept the relationship strong through bad news. You can negotiate scope, set expectations that hold, and represent your team’s work credibly to an executive buyer.
Agentic, hands-on. You are ready to build, orchestrate, and operate multi-agent workflows. You are familiar with current agent frameworks and you think in terms of what to automate and how to compose agents into reliable workflows.
An instinct to instrument. You are comfortable with data — SQL, BI tooling, time-series telemetry — and you can do your own analysis on facility data rather than waiting for someone to hand you a chart. You treat measurement and verification as the core of the work, because in this business an unverified improvement is not an improvement.
Technically credible without needing to be the physicist. You can absorb enough of the underlying physics and modeling to make good scoping and sequencing decisions, ask the questions that expose risk, and explain the work accurately to a customer. You do not need to derive the models or write production code.
Bias to ship. Demonstrated ability to operate without bureaucracy in fast-moving environments. You ship; you do not stall. You are comfortable being the person who decides when nobody has told you the answer.
Appetite for scope. You want a role that grows faster than a title normally allows, and you are willing to take on responsibility ahead of formal structure to get it.