Director of Innovation

About Southland:
As a leader in MEP building systems, we provide integrated, full lifecycle building solutions that optimize the design, construction, operation, and efficiency of buildings.

We partner with our clients and leverage the collective expertise of our people to create better-built environments where communities and businesses can thrive. Since our founding over 75 years ago, we've continued to think big to account for the whole picture. Our engineering, construction, service, and energy solutions deliver results that will work for you, your building, and your business or community.

About the Role:

The Director of Innovation builds and leads Southland’s enterprise innovation capability. This leader creates a structured, repeatable path for identifying business opportunities, evaluating emerging technologies, running disciplined experiments, and scaling solutions that produce measurable value.

Working across the business and Technology & Innovation, the Director owns the innovation operating model, portfolio, governance, partnerships, and performance measures from idea intake through a decision to scale, stop, or iterate. The role will initially place significant emphasis on Artificial Intelligence and Generative AI while establishing a broader model for emerging technologies and new ways of working.

Success requires balancing speed and experimentation with business accountability, cybersecurity, legal, financial, architectural, data, and operational considerations. The Director partners closely with the PMO, Change Management, Architecture, Cybersecurity, Legal, Procurement, Finance, Data & Analytics, HR, and business leaders so innovation moves quickly without creating disconnected technology, unmanaged risk, or pilots that never translate into business value.

• Establish Southland’s enterprise innovation strategy, operating model, governance, processes, funding approach, and ways of working.
• Define roles, decision rights, investment criteria, escalation paths, standards, and guardrails that support responsible experimentation without unnecessary bureaucracy.
• Establish and manage an Innovation Steering Committee, including decision criteria, portfolio reviews, meeting cadence, and executive reporting.
• Create a practical lifecycle that moves opportunities from idea to assessment, experiment, and a clear scale, stop, or iterate decision.

• Establish a common enterprise process for capturing, framing, and evaluating innovation opportunities.
• Partner with business leaders to define the problem, intended outcome, and accountable sponsor before selecting a technology solution.
• Evaluate opportunities based on strategic alignment, business value, feasibility, risk, investment, scalability, and organizational readiness.
• Maintain enterprise visibility into the innovation pipeline, active experiments, investments, outcomes, dependencies, and decisions.
• Identify overlapping efforts, promote reuse, and provide clear recommendations on which opportunities should advance, pause, pivot, or stop.

• Establish a disciplined approach for pilots, proofs of concept, prototypes, and other experiments.
• Require every experiment to have a defined problem, accountable sponsor, hypothesis, success measures, investment requirements, risk review, and decision date.
• Enable controlled experimentation through appropriate sandbox environments, data access, and governance mechanisms.
• Drive rapid learning cycles, maintain appropriate scope, capture lessons learned, and prevent “pilot purgatory” through explicit decisions.

• Lead the enterprise approach to evaluating and…