Director Grid and Market Solutions - Markets

About the role

Provides strategic leadership and oversight in the development and delivery of solutions for ERCOT’s Energy Market Systems and applications within the Grid and Market Solutions (GMS) organization. This role leads initiatives to position ERCOT to effectively manage the evolving complexities of the electric power industry by advancing long-term staff capabilities, market systems, and technology solutions.

Responsibilities

• Drives development, engineering analysis and support of critical business systems and applications.
  • These systems encompass real-time and day-ahead energy markets (SCED and DAM), Reliability Unit Commitment (RUC), Ancillary Services, Congestion Revenue Rights (CRR), Market Submissions, Outage Scheduler (OS), DCTIE, Market Simulator, Energy Management System (EMS) Interfaces, Market Reports and the integration and flow of market data between internal and external systems.
  • Plays a pivotal role in defining technical requirements and roadmaps for new market systems, changes to existing market systems and ensuring consistent methodologies and standards are enforced for all systems.
  • Collaborate closely with vendors in these areas to align vendors roadmaps with ERCOT’s roadmaps.
• Oversee the full systems development lifecycle, ensuring compliance with ERCOT policies, security standards, and NERC CIP requirements.
• Accountable for 24x7 operational availability and reliability of critical market systems.

Requirements

• Requires proven leadership, effective communication, program and project management experience, and the ability to develop talent into Principal-level roles.
• Responsible for hiring, coaching, training, and performance management of staff.
• Regularly interacts with executives and/or major customers.
• Interacts frequently involve special skills, such as negotiating with customers or management regarding matters of significance to the organization.
• Directs and controls the activities of a broad functional area through several department managers within ERCOT.
• Has overall control of planning, staffing, budgeting, managing expense priorities, and recommending and implementing changes to methods.
• Responsible for budgetary decisions within functional areas according to organizational policy/guidelines.
• Recommend financial decisions that impact area of responsibility.

Additional Job Duties

• Ability to lead and motivate individuals and teams to achieve program and project objectives.
• Lead the development of GMS technology development and engineering teams responsible for delivering the high-quality software solutions, engineering analysis, support and services to ERCOT business users for the complex market redesign requirements and evolving grid challenges.
• Lead requirements reviews and provide strategic direction on design and architectural changes of market systems and applications for market redesign initiatives, enhancements and technology upgrades.
• Guides cross-functional teams in conducting comprehensive impact analysis for market initiatives and ensures strong collaboration with business stakeholders, GMS, and IT teams.
• Anticipates and drives ERCOT market systems design changes to ensure market systems operate with industry-leading performance and reliability by adopting advanced energy-market optimization techniques and solver technologies.
• Oversees team adherence to Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) processes and quality-assurance best practices to ensure the delivery of high-quality market systems and applications software solutions to business users.
• Oversees weekly CIM Model promotion to EMMS Market systems.
• Ensure that all 24X7 business processes are executed per the documented procedures of the division and meet user expectations.
• Possesses a good understanding of market settlements and credit monitoring functions.
• Possesses a good understanding of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies and leads the adoption and integration of AI/ML capabilities across ERCOT’s market and grid systems, enhancing application functionality and delivering greater value to business stakeholders.
• Foster a culture of continuous improvements by empowering teams to identify and remediate process, tool, and application inefficiencies, leveraging advanced analytics and GenAI capabilities to advance operational excellence and deliver high-quality outcomes.
• Evaluates emerging technologies, and drive proof-of-concept initiatives that advance organizational capabilities and shape long-term technology strategy for market systems.
• Collaborates closely with the Grid Transformation team on executing transformative market-initiatives proof-of-concepts and develop implementation strategy to operationalize those market initiatives.
• Develops and maintains market applications technology road map and strategic plan.
• Partners with business stakeholders to define priorities and guide release planning to ensure timely, high-impact delivery of market-system enhancements.
• Establish market systems performance objectives and ensure service level objectives are met.
• Actively participates in long-range strategy planning and manages policy development to address complex business issues and provides leadership to cross-functional teams.
• Leads strategic and tactical activities including the development of new policies and procedures to ensure consistent, responsive, and reliable market systems.
• Effective engagement and management of vendors for this functional area.
• Collaborates closely with ERCOT’s vendor-management team and business units to develop, negotiate, and finalize vendor contracts for this functional area.
• Represents GMS in key ERCOT market stakeholder forums including Technology Working Group (TWG), Protocol Revision Subcommittee (PRS), Wholesale Market Subcommittee (WMS), Congestion Management Working Group (CMWG) etc. to advance organizational priorities and ensure alignment between ERCOT initiatives and enterprise objectives.

Qualifications

• Requires minimum 10 years job-related work experience and 5 years in a management or leadership role in excess of degree requirements.
• Minimum years of job-related experience can include time in leadership roles.
• Experience with one of the vendors (Hitachi/ABB, GE, Siemens, Resource Innovations/Nexant) Energy or Market Management Systems and applications is preferred.

Skills

• Proven leadership, effective communication, program and project management experience.
• Ability to lead and motivate individuals and teams to achieve program and project objectives.
• Good understanding of market settlements and credit monitoring functions.
• Good understanding of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies.
• Good understanding of advanced energy-market optimization techniques and solver technologies.
• Good understanding of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) processes and quality-assurance best practices.
• Good understanding of emerging technologies and proof-of-concept initiatives.
• Good understanding of vendor management and negotiation.
• Good understanding of market systems and applications development.
• Good understanding of market systems performance objectives and service level objectives.
• Good understanding of long-range strategy planning and policy development.
• Good understanding of cross-functional team collaboration and impact analysis.

Benefits

ERCOT is committed to fostering inclusion at all levels of our company. It is the cornerstone of our corporate values of accountability, leadership, innovation, trust, and expertise. We know that individuals with a wide variety of talents, ideas, and experiences propel the innovation that drives our success. An inclusive and diverse workforce strengthens us and allows for a collaborative environment to solve the challenges that face our industry today and in the future.

Pay

$244,000 - $336,000

Schedule

Employees will be required to be on-site in Taylor, TX at a minimum of 2 days per week, or more, as needed based on the business needs as determined by management. Remote work is required to be performed from your Texas residence. Employees may opt to work on-site more than required or 100% of the time.