Director, Data Center Market

About the Role

Gridco is a utility contractor and engineering services company building and maintaining critical electric infrastructure across the Southeast. We serve investor-owned utilities, electric cooperatives, municipal power authorities, and commercial/industrial customers with substation, transmission, distribution, lighting, and fiber work. We are a private equity–backed platform headquartered in Birmingham with field crews operating across multiple states.

The Director, Data Center Market will be responsible for owning and growing Gridco's business in the data center market. This is a front-line, customer-facing role: build the relationships and win the substation, transmission, and electrical infrastructure work that powers data centers across the Southeast and beyond.

Responsibilities

• Own the data center pipeline: identify, qualify, and pursue opportunities from early site and interconnection activity through award, and keep Pipedrive current with owners, stage, and next steps.
• Build developer and EPC relationships: develop and manage relationships with owners and developers (hyperscalers, colocation, and AI developers) and the EPCs designing their sites, so Gridco is known and specified early.
• Team with general contractors: build and manage relationships with the GCs building data centers (e.g., Brasfield & Gorrie, Hoar, Yates, Robins & Morton) to become their go-to self-perform substation and electrical partner and get pulled onto their projects.
• Partner with utilities and their unregulated teams: develop relationships with the serving utilities and, critically, the competitive/unregulated arms of the investor-owned utilities (e.g., APC Energy Services / Southern Company) that pursue data center and large-load work, positioning Gridco as their construction partner and getting scoped in at the design and interconnection phase.
• Sell the Gridco value: position self-perform substation, transmission, and electrical scope and the speed-to-energization story to developers, EPCs, GCs, and utility partners.
• Build and execute the conference strategy: own Gridco's data center event plan, select the right shows, secure the right presence (speaking, sponsorship, booth), run structured lead capture on-site, and drive disciplined post-event follow-up that converts into pipeline.
• Run pursuits and market intelligence: coordinate with estimating and preconstruction on proposals, teaming agreements, and NDAs; keep the data center project tracker current (developer, stage, GC/electrical, utility, permits); and feed it into the growth strategy and the AI-enabled platform.
• Partner internally: work with the self-perform operations teams to convert wins, and with marketing and leadership on collateral, strategy, and reporting.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree, plus 7+ years in business development or sales in electrical infrastructure, utility construction, EPC, or data center development (data center or mission-critical experience strongly preferred).
• Established relationships with data center developers, EPCs, general contractors, or utilities (including utility unregulated/competitive teams), ideally in the Southeast.
• Strong grasp of substation, transmission, and interconnection scope and the data center power-delivery process.
• Proven pursuit and relationship-management track record, comfortable with executive-level customers.
• Willing to travel, and fluent with CRM (Pipedrive) and modern productivity and AI tools.