Strategic Partnerships Associate

About the Role

As Senior Manager, Substation Operations, you will lead operational oversight, reliability planning, and integration readiness for critical substation and transmission infrastructure supporting North American data center operations. This role ensures the continuous availability and resiliency of power supply systems through disciplined operations, maintenance governance, utility coordination, and proactive risk mitigation. You will serve as the operational integration lead for sites incorporating power generation and grid-interconnection assets, ensuring a seamless transition from construction and commissioning into safe, reliable commercial operations.

This position is based onsite at our Nashville, TN offices and supports mission-critical infrastructure where safety, uptime, procedural accuracy, and operational consistency are essential.

Responsibilities

• Provide leadership and oversight for the operation, maintenance, integration, and reliability of critical substation and transmission infrastructure supporting data center operations.
• Ensure continuous availability and resiliency of power supply systems through proactive operating discipline, risk identification, and reliability governance.
• Develop maintenance, inspection, testing, and reliability programs for substations, transmission assets, grid-interconnection equipment, protection systems, and associated electrical infrastructure.
• Lead incident response, root cause analysis, corrective action planning, and lessons-learned execution for substation and power delivery events.
• Build and maintain strong relationships with utility providers, transmission operators, interconnection partners, and senior utility leadership to ensure obligations and service commitments are met.
• Assess existing infrastructure for operational vulnerabilities, capacity constraints, reliability risks, and maintenance gaps; develop mitigation strategies and execution plans.
• Partner with engineering, development, construction, and commissioning teams to ensure future infrastructure designs meet reliability, maintainability, safety, and operational readiness expectations.
• Serve as the operations integration lead for facilities incorporating generation assets, substations, transmission interconnections, and other critical power infrastructure.
• Coordinate transition activities between construction, commissioning, acceptance testing, asset onboarding, procedure development, training, staffing, and commercial operations teams.
• Ensure operational readiness through procedures, staffing plans, training programs, maintenance frameworks, spare parts planning, and handoff governance.
• Build, lead, and develop a team responsible for substation operations, asset integration, reliability execution, and operational readiness activities.
• Provide leadership with clear visibility into operational risks, utility dependencies, reliability trends, readiness gaps, outage exposure, and resource requirements.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in transmission and substation operations, including construction, commissioning, maintenance, protection systems, or high-voltage infrastructure operations.
• Experience managing critical electrical infrastructure and high-reliability operations in utility, power generation, data center, industrial, or mission-critical environments.
• Experience working directly with utility leadership, transmission operators, OEMs, contractors, and internal technical stakeholders in complex operating environments.
• Experience with power generation facilities and transitioning large projects from construction and commissioning into commercial operations.
• Proven leadership experience managing teams, building technical capability, and developing scalable operational standards.
• Bachelor's degree in engineering, engineering technology, construction management, or equivalent practical experience.

Skills

• Strong technical and operational judgment across substations, transmission infrastructure, high-voltage equipment, protection systems, utility interfaces, and power reliability.
• Leadership discipline in staffing, team development, procedure ownership, maintenance governance, incident response, and operational readiness.
• Strong utility partnership skills with the ability to manage service expectations, contractual obligations, escalation paths, and executive-level engagement.
• Ability to bridge engineering design, construction execution, commissioning evidence, operational procedures, and long-term maintenance requirements.
• Strong risk management mindset with the ability to identify vulnerabilities, prioritize mitigations, and communicate operational exposure clearly.
• Clear written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to prepare executive-ready updates, decision summaries, and readiness reporting.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting mission-critical facilities, hyperscale data centers, colocation environments, large industrial operations, utilities, or power generation assets.
• Experience with utility-scale generation, grid interconnection projects, high-voltage switching, relay protection, SCADA, NERC/FERC concepts, or substation automation.
• Experience developing maintenance programs, operating procedures, training plans, reliability dashboards, or operational readiness playbooks.
• Professional engineering license, PMP, NERC, electrical safety, high-voltage switching, or related operations/reliability certification.
• Experience leading geographically distributed teams or coordinating operational readiness across multiple sites.

Work Environment

This role operates across office, remote collaboration, utility, construction, commissioning, substation, generation, and active data center environments. The position may require travel up to 50% based on project and operational needs. Site work may involve walking large facilities, standing for extended periods, using stairs, working near energized infrastructure under approved procedures, and following all safety, PPE, security, and access-control requirements.

Regular attendance, collaboration across time zones, schedule flexibility, and occasional support during readiness milestones, escalations, audits, or urgent operational activities may be required.

Pay

Hiring range in USD from: $126,200 - $264,100 per year. May be eligible for bonus, equity, and compensation deferral.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, including expert medical opinion
• Short term disability and long term disability
• Life insurance and AD&D
• Supplemental life insurance (Employee/Spouse/Child)
• Health care and dependent care Flexible Spending Accounts
• Pre-tax commuter and parking benefits
• 401(k) Savings and Investment Plan with company match
• Paid time off: Flexible Vacation is provided to all eligible employees assigned to a salaried (non-overtime eligible) position. For employees working at least 35 hours per week, the vacation accrual rate is 13 days annually for the first three years of employment and 18 days annually for subsequent years of employment. Vacation accrual is prorated for employees working between 20 and 34 hours per week.
• 11 paid holidays
• Paid sick leave: 72 hours of paid sick leave upon date of hire. Refreshes each calendar year. Unused balance will carry over each year up to a maximum cap of 112 hours.
• Paid parental leave
• Adoption assistance
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Financial planning and group legal
• Voluntary benefits including auto, homeowner and pet insurance