AI Data Center Phased Delivery Lead

About The Role

The Phased Delivery SME is a senior, strategic operator responsible for designing and governing the end-to-end phased delivery model that brings AI data center campuses online safely, predictably, and s person is the connective tissue across development, design, construction, controls, commissioning, facilities operations, network and IT deployment, liquid cooling infrastructure, and first‑workload readiness.

In this role, you will set the standard for how partially complete sites transition from construction zones into operational AI capacity. You will create the frameworks, decision models, readiness gates, handoff criteria, risk controls, and cross‑functional execution mechanisms needed to deliver data halls, utility capacity, grey space, white space, and liquid‑cooled compute environments in tightly sequenced waves.

This role requires deep experience operating in ambiguity, leading across functions without direct authority, and driving execution in environments where the site is simultaneously a construction project, a commissioning program, and a live production operation.

• Define and own the enterprise phased delivery methodology for large-scale AI data center campuses.
• Establish the operating model for delivering sites in progressive stages, from early utility readiness and shell completion through grey space fit‑out, commissioning, IT installation, and customer workload activation.
• Build standardized phase definitions, entry/exit criteria, handoff checkpoints, go/no‑go gates, and risk escalation paths.
• Create the governance model that aligns construction progress, infrastructure readiness, safety, operations, and customer launch commitments.

• Serve as the senior integrator across real estate development, design, construction, commissioning, facilities engineering, network deployment, server deployment, supply chain, security, EH&S, and operations.
• Drive coordination across multiple work streams that may be at different maturity levels within the same campus.
• Ensure dependencies between civil, structural, MEP, controls, cooling, power, network, and compute deployment are fully understood and actively managed.
• Lead executive‑level alignment on sequencing decisions, constraints, trade‑offs, and recovery plans.

• Develop and institutionalize site readiness frameworks for phased turnover of buildings, yards, utility plants, data halls, grey space, and supporting operational areas.
• Define operational acceptance criteria for spaces transitioning from construction control to facilities and IT control.
• Ensure temporary conditions, shared systems, incomplete scope areas, and construction adjacency risks are clearly identified and managed.
• Partner with commissioning and operations leaders to enable safe turnover of partially completed environments without compromising future‑phase execution.

• Integrate liquid cooling readiness requirements into the phased delivery strategy, including CDU readiness, fluid distribution, controls integration, leak detection, commissioning dependencies, and operational supportability.
• Ensure compute deployment readiness is aligned to mechanical, electrical, controls, and networking milestones.
• Anticipate and resolve issues unique to high‑density AI environments, including power ramp strategy, thermal risk, redundancy staging, and partial‑system operations.

• Identify delivery, operational, safety, and customer risks introduced by phased occupancy and partial turnover models.
• Build mitigation strategies for shared infrastructure, temporary power/cooling configurations, construction interference, access controls, and incomplete resiliency states.
• Lead structured readiness reviews, phase risk assessments, and recovery planning when milestones drift or dependencies break.
• Provide executive visibility into key risks, constraints, and decision points across phases.

• Develop playbooks, templates, checklists, RACI models, dashboards, and lessons‑learned…