Director, Mechanical OR Electrical Design (Remote)

Director, MEP Design — Mechanical or Electrical

Location: US East Coast — Northern Virginia or NY metro

Compensation: [insert band] DOE, plus bonus

Travel: Up to 20%

Direct reports: None

A privately backed digital infrastructure developer is hiring a senior design engineer from either a mechanical or an electrical background.

There is no team underneath this position. The title reflects seniority and how you'll be positioned externally — with consultants, utilities, authorities and partners — rather than a headcount to manage. The work itself is design, and you will be doing it.

About the business

We acquire land and develop data centre campuses for hyperscale and AI/HPC end users, taking projects from site evaluation and entitlement through design, construction and into operation. Because we hold the asset rather than hand it off, the technical decisions made early carry real consequences — and the people making them sit at the same table as the commercial team.

The team is small and deliberately senior. Everyone here has spent years in the sector and operates independently: setting design direction, directing external consultants, and owning the outcome rather than administering a process. Deep technical capability is not a support function in this business. It is the product.

On discipline

We are open on whether your core strength is mechanical or electrical. What matters is that one of them is genuinely deep — you've owned packages, made the calls, and can hold your own against a consultant on your own ground — and that you're fluent enough across the rest of the MEP picture to see where the interfaces bite.

Mechanical candidates will be closest to cooling strategy and high-density thermal design. Electrical candidates will be closest to power distribution, resilience topology and utility interface. Both sit in the same seat and face the same scope.

Core responsibilities

Design ownership. You'll own the design in your discipline across multiple buildings and campuses running at different stages at once, with a strong bias toward technical rigour, mission critical resilience and cost discipline.

• Act as the primary technical point of contact for design partners: weekly working sessions, drawing reviews, technical breakouts.
• Perform the calculations and analysis yourself to form an independent view on design direction, rather than accepting a consultant's position unexamined.
• Flag technical and programme risk to internal stakeholders early and in plain terms.
• Manage design timelines and deliverables across internal and external parties, capture lessons learned, and tighten the process each cycle.

Project execution. You'll act as the design authority on campuses already under construction.

• Heavy construction administration: sitting between design consultants, internal construction management and tenant teams to resolve ambiguity in design intent before it becomes a change order.
• Interpret end-user technical standards and translate them into clear direction for external consultants with minimal hand-holding.
• Working fluency across the trades you don't own — mechanical, electrical, telecoms, civil, structural and architectural — enough to spot a clash before it lands.

Wider remit

Beyond the core design work, you'll be drawn into the front end of development. None of this is administrative — it's where the technical view shapes whether a project happens at all.

• Feasibility and diligence. Diligence is usually executed by consulting partners, but the scope is written in-house to fit each site. That means a working understanding of entitlement and land use constraints, the capacity and limitations of nearby power, water and fibre, permitting regimes and their realistic timelines, master planning and massing against code and natural constraints, and ground, environmental and heritage risk.
• Building the partner bench. Helping identify, interview and assemble consultant teams — engineers, architects, surveyors and legal — with the local knowledge to de-risk delivery in a given market.
• Concept development. Working with consulting teams to shape concepts, programmes and estimates, and communicating them clearly to internal and external audiences.
• Design delivery oversight. Developing a close understanding of each local design-delivery regime, then running day-to-day oversight of meetings, decisions and milestones through to permit.
• Technical standards. Building and maintaining an in-house design standard that captures our engineering preferences, so each development cycle starts further forward than the last.

What we're looking for

Engineers from the consulting or design house side, who've run their own packages, dealt directly with clients, and are used to being accountable for the drawing rather than for a headcount.

• Data centre or mission critical design experience, giving you natural familiarity with the drawing sets, permits and trade interdependencies that bring a project out of the ground.
• Confidence in drafting and spatial analysis tools — used for early concept evaluation, real-time collaboration and presentation material, not just production.
• The ability to look at a specific site, enumerate what makes it unusual, and articulate how those variables become the constraints of the design.
• Someone who identifies the weak point and turns up with a solution attached, rather than escalating it.

Who this won't suit: anyone looking to step back from the technical detail, or anyone whose recent experience has been managing a process rather than producing a design.

Baseline requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering (Mechanical or Electrical preferred; Civil, Structural or Construction Management considered) from an accredited institution.
• 8+ years of data centre or mission critical design experience within an MEP design practice. PE, chartered or equivalent licensure strongly preferred.
• AutoCAD and/or Revit capability.
• Solid grasp of how coordinated construction documents come together, and of running the teams executing the design.
• Working knowledge of local codes, ordinances and development standards in core data centre markets, including complex regulatory environments.
• Exposure to high-density cooling and large-scale power distribution on AI/HPC deployments.
• Willingness to travel up to 20%.