Senior Director, Operational Technology & Controls

Description

Our purpose at CloudHQ is to provide flexible, efficient and resilient data center solutions to businesses of all sizes. Our growing organization was founded by the pioneer of data center REITs. CloudHQ has state-of-the-art data center sites located in two Northern Virginia locations, as well as London, Frankfurt, Paris, Milan, and Sao Paulo, and we anticipate exponential growth over the next several years both in the US and abroad.

The Senior Director of Operational Technology & Controls is CloudHQ's senior authority for building automation, controls, and operational technology across the global data center portfolio. The role owns the reference architecture and governance for Building Management Systems (BMS), Electrical Power Monitoring Systems (EPMS), Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM), and the OT networks and cybersecurity infrastructure beneath them — and will stand up a centralized Facilities Operations Center delivering 24x7 multi-site alarm monitoring, event correlation, and analytics.

This is a player-coach role for a leader who has operated on both sides of the IT/OT divide: someone who has delivered controls systems in live mission-critical environments, held program-level budget and vendor accountability, carried an enterprise through ISO 27001 and SOC audit cycles, and recruited and developed the technical teams that sustain all of it. The role also partners directly with CloudHQ's internal AI and analytics team to make facility telemetry the foundation of our next generation of AI-enabled operations: predictive maintenance, automated fault diagnostics, and energy optimization.

• Architect, stand up, and lead a centralized Facilities Operations Center monitoring BMS and EPMS across all campuses, including alarm triage standards, escalation management, event correlation, and coordination with site operations teams.
• Establish portfolio-wide standards for alarm management, trend analysis, and fault detection and diagnostics (FDD), driving the operating model from reactive to predictive.
• Define and report operational metrics to executive leadership: alarm volumes and response times, nuisance-alarm reduction, telemetry completeness, and efficiency indicators supporting PUE targets.

• Own the reference architecture for building automation and controls: BAS/BMS, EPMS, DCIM, SCADA concepts, and the supporting OT network infrastructure.
• Govern controls integration across BACnet/IP, Modbus RTU/TCP, SNMP, MQTT, and OPC-UA, ensuring every new deployment conforms to standard.
• Direct point-to-point verification and integration quality assurance for controls scope on new construction and retrofits.

• Own the OT cybersecurity program: network segmentation, zero-trust approaches for legacy building equipment, secure remote access, and next-generation firewall (NGFW) architecture for controls networks.
• Serve as the IT/OT/cybersecurity subject matter expert in ISO 27001 and SOC audit cycles — data calls, policy authorship, reviews, and approvals.
• Establish and enforce documented change management policy for OT systems, aligned to NIST guidance and data center operational best practice.
• Ensure SIEM and network monitoring visibility into OT environments in partnership with the IT organization.

• Lead controls scope through commissioning and turnover of new data center facilities, working with the general contractor, commissioning agents, and controls vendors.
• Guarantee telemetry completeness at Day 1 of operations: every point mapped, named to standard, alarmed appropriately, and flowing to the central platform.

• Partner with CloudHQ's internal AI team to expose clean, structured, real-time facility telemetry for advanced analytics, automated root-cause diagnostics, and energy optimization.
• Evaluate cloud-connected smart building and analytics platforms; drive integration with maintenance management (CMMS) platforms for automated work-order generation.