Senior Director, Project Controls

Role Overview

The Senior Director of Project Controls is accountable for global and regional cost, estimating, schedule, risk, and change management across massive capital programs. This leader safeguards margins, validates baselines, and prevents costly delays in mission-critical hyperscale or enterprise data center builds.

Core Mandate

Establish enterprise-wide governance, reporting rhythms, and performance indicators (KPIs) to ensure data center portfolios are delivered on time and within budget.

Key Focus

Bridging field execution with executive/portfolio leadership by acting as an early warning system for cost variances and schedule logic issues.

What You'll Do

• Establish a global Project Controls Center of Excellence, defining uniform methodologies, tools, and data governance.
• Govern cost and estimating management framework, ensuring the establishment of validated Project and Portfolio baselines, cost targets and delivery within budget.
• Govern the change management framework, ensuring all scope variations and change orders trace through comprehensive approval workflows.
• Oversee the development of integrated schedules, baselines, and resource allocation models from concept through commissioning and turnover.
• Lead monthly forecasting, cost modeling, and variance narratives (cost vs. budget).
• Review and approve the development of full life cycle Project estimates and cost targets.
• Review and approve compensation model development and complex construction claims.
• Drive data integrity across the portfolio by linking field progress to financial systems.
• Run schedule quality reviews (logic, critical path integrity) and enforce recovery planning.
• Own the RAID (Risks, Assumptions, Issues, Dependencies) log across the portfolio, implementing global standards for mitigation.
• Manage and mentor distributed teams of controls professionals, cost managers, and schedulers.
• Collaborate closely with Supply Chain, Engineering, Construction, Finance, and Client/Executive stakeholders to maintain a single source of truth.

You Experience

• 10+ years in Program Project Controls / Cost / Commercial Management for large capital mission-critical hyperscale data center programs and/or high tech construction.
• 10+ years leading teams, including external partners, contractors, and distributed groups.
• Advanced proficiency with enterprise reporting/tools such as Primavera P6, Procore, and Oracle Unifier.
• Deep understanding and subject matter expertise of data center construction economics and cost management including, but not limited to, Earned Value Management (EVM), construction change orders, and schedule quality (CPM/Primavera P6).

About Lambda

Founded in 2012, with 500+ employees, and growing fast. Our investors notably include TWG Global, US Innovative Technology Fund (USIT), Andra Capital, SGW, Andrej Karpathy, ARK Invest, Fincadia Advisors, G Squared, In-Q-Tel (IQT), KHK & Partners, NVIDIA, Pegatron, Supermicro, Wistron, Wiwynn, Gradient Ventures, Mercato Partners, SVB, 1517, and Crescent Cove. We have research papers accepted at top machine learning and graphics conferences, including NeurIPS, ICCV, SIGGRAPH, and TOG. Our values are publicly available: https://lambda.ai/careers. We offer generous cash & equity compensation, health, dental, and vision coverage for you and your dependents, wellness and commuter stipends for select roles, a 401k Plan with 2% company match (USA employees), and a flexible paid time off plan that we all actually use. Equal Opportunity Employer.

Compensation Range

The annual salary range for this position has been set based on market data and other factors. However, a salary higher or lower than this range may be appropriate for a candidate whose qualifications differ meaningfully from those listed in the job description.