Director of Data Center Field Engineering

We are seeking an experienced Director of Data Center Field Engineering to lead a growing North America organization responsible for field delivery across enterprise, large scale, mission critical, colocation, and hyperscale Data Center environments. The Director leads through three Practice Leads and is accountable for the overall workforce, partner ecosystem, delivery performance, organizational capability, and operating health of the Data Center Field Engineering organization. This is a leader of leaders role. The Director is expected to build the organization and operating capability required to support growth while maintaining strong execution, quality, accountability, workforce readiness, and financial discipline. The role works across Professional Services, project delivery, technical teams, resource management, partners, and business leadership to ensure the organization can support what the business is committing to deliver.

What you'll be doing

• Lead, coach, develop, and hold accountable three Data Center Field Engineering Practice Leads.
• Set clear expectations for leadership, workforce readiness, utilization, delivery health, quality, performance management, and accountability across the organization.
• Maintain a forward looking view of demand, capacity, skills, geography, workforce risk, and future hiring or partner requirements.
• Build workforce strategies that use the right mix of employees, contractors, and delivery partners based on demand, capability, cost, location, and risk.
• Maintain a Data Center partner ecosystem with the capability, capacity, geographic coverage, quality, and union or non-union support required by the delivery model.
• Maintain visibility to major customer engagements, delivery risks, resource issues, partner concerns, quality trends, and escalations.
• Provide leadership on major delivery issues that require organizational, workforce, partner, or cross functional decisions.
• Drive consistent adoption of Field Engineering delivery methods, tools, quality expectations, escalation practices, and operating processes.
• Monitor utilization, workforce cost, partner spend, labor mix, productivity, capacity, and other operating measures and use them to make informed decisions.
• Partner with Finance, Resource Management, PMO, RDD, Solutions, Sales, Costing and Estimating, Partner Management, and other delivery leaders.
• Support major opportunities and programs by validating that proposed delivery dates, workforce models, field leadership, partner assumptions, and Field Engineering costs are practical and executable.
• Build leadership depth, succession plans, and development priorities so the organization can scale without depending on a small number of individuals.
• Identify recurring delivery or operating issues and drive corrective actions that improve the broader organization.
• Strong understanding of Data Center infrastructure deployment and field execution in active, construction, commissioning, colocation, mission critical, or hyperscale environments.
• Working knowledge of rack installation, rack build, land and level, equipment integration, structured cabling, cable management, and related physical infrastructure activities.
• Working knowledge of fiber and copper installation, routing, dressing, termination, testing, patching, labeling, documentation, and acceptance expectations.
• Understanding of site readiness, surveys, migrations, commissioning support, quality evidence, closeout, and customer specific execution requirements.
• Experience leading organizations that use a blended workforce of internal technical leaders, field resources, contractors, and delivery partners.
• Understanding of the operating requirements associated with large scale programs, rapid workforce ramp, geographic coverage, and partner based execution.

What you have

• At least 10 years of Field Engineering, Data Center infrastructure delivery, Professional Services, technical services, or related experience; 12-15+ years preferred.
• At least 5 years of experience leading managers, leaders, or large distributed technical teams.
• Experience leading an organization of comparable size and complexity across multiple geographies or customer programs.
• Experience supporting large scale or hyperscale Data Center programs strongly preferred.
• Strong workforce planning, capacity management, utilization, performance management, and organizational leadership experience.
• Experience developing and managing partner based delivery models.
• Strong financial and operational acumen, including the ability to connect workforce and partner decisions to utilization, cost, productivity, and delivery performance.
• Demonstrated ability to lead through other leaders rather than personally managing every project or escalation.
• Ability to work effectively across technical, operational, commercial, and executive teams.
• Strong communication, judgment, decision making, and organizational skills.
• Ability to operate in a fast moving environment where customer demand, resource requirements, and delivery priorities can change quickly.