Senior Design Manager

Duties And Responsibilities

• Drive projects from inception through customer or business turnover, with heavy focus and leadership in the preconstruction and design phases of projects.
• The Design Manager assumes project lead role at design hand-off meeting from the land enablement team and shifts overall project leadership to the Construction Manager (CM) at GC mobilization.
• Supports day-to-day program activities and initiatives (engage with architects, consultants, equipment providers, GCs, etc.).
• Covers coordination/communication with the land enablement group to ensure success with offsite improvements, early permitting, easements and environmental studies.
• Coordinates/creates project risk registers from land enablement phase through project completion/turnover to Aligned Operations Project Design Management Lead/coordinates onboarding of third-party design team and creation of design schedule to support project needs.
• Oversees management of external third-party design team through project completion/turnover to Aligned Operations.
• Drives review and management of design deliverables; includes stakeholder review and comment cycles.
• Holds design team accountable to design progression and design gating.
• Works with SMEs, Operations, and CMs to ensure design compliance with Aligned Design Efficiency Capture (DEC).
• Identifies design variances, tracks them and manages acquisition of necessary approvals, as required.
• Enforces design team’s accountability to Aligned’s Cost Control Log (CCL) and Complies, Deviates, Excludes (CDE) matrices.
• Operates in lockstep with the CM on each project to ensure proper communications/escalations and regular reporting to all internal and external parties and leadership/management.
• Creates, manages and updates project metrics in Smartsheets (project dashboards) for each project.
• Owes or directs all administrative duties related to design management process.
• Assists CM with building and maintaining budget/cost models/all phases’ budgets for each project, specifically around design costs and timelines.
• Works with CM to prepare and present all funding requests.
• Coordinates with CM to prepare and present quarterly project updates for leadership.
• Conducts technical review of construction plans with understanding of architectural design within data center environment.
• Communicates conceptual designs to multiple internal Aligned teams with required project documentation prior to and during construction.
• Cross references to customer requirements as needed.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Construction Management, Engineering or equivalent.
• 9+ years progressive experience in successfully managing commercial construction project design programs, with data center experience strongly preferred.
• Mechanical/Electrical background preferred.
• Advanced experience in Excel, Smartsheets and/or AutoCAD.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Ability to multi-task, with strong time and change management / organizational skills.
• Ability to always maintain discretion and confidentiality.
• Ability to understand and follow clear directions and meet specific deadlines with reporting, communication, and project schedules.
• Team player across the organization with strong communication skills.
• Ability to interpret construction drawings and specifications.
• Knowledge of construction cost estimating methods and development of scopes of work.
• Knowledge of construction project scopes.
• Able to monitor and interpret design and schedule changes and forecast their impact on overall project costs.
• May travel, at times, up to 25%.