Colt Data Centre Services
Global Director of Engineering
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Global Director of Engineering
Location: United Kingdom preferred, with regular international travel across Europe, India and Japan
Reporting to: Chief Real Estate Officer
Role Purpose
The Global Director of Engineering leads the Global Engineering function and is accountable for ensuring that engineering enables the company’s growth, customer proposition and successful delivery of data centre capacity across its global portfolio.
The role owns and continuously evolves the Global Reference Design (GRD), ensuring it anticipates both current and future customer requirements, market trends and technology developments. Given the multi-year lifecycle of data centre developments, the GRD must ensure that projects designed today remain relevant, competitive and fit for purpose when they become operational.
Engineering decisions must be made with a strong commercial mindset. The objective is not to pursue technical perfection in isolation, but to optimise overall business outcomes by balancing customer requirements, time to market, CAPEX, constructability, operational performance, resilience and sustainability. Standardisation and reuse should be actively pursued where they accelerate delivery and improve returns, even where a locally optimised technical solution could theoretically be achieved.
The Global Director of Engineering leads a multidisciplinary team of engineering subject matter experts, architects and project/pre-sales engineering resources, providing technical authority and expertise from early site assessment and acquisition through design, construction and commissioning.
Key Responsibilities
Global Engineering Leadership
- Lead, develop and inspire a high-performing, multidisciplinary Global Engineering organisation across Mechanical, Electrical, Controls, Architecture, BIM, Civil, Structural and other relevant engineering disciplines.
- Continuously evolve the size, structure, capabilities and geographic footprint of the Engineering organisation to support growth in development capacity, entry into new markets and changing customer and business requirements.
- Attract, develop and retain high-calibre engineering talent and build strong succession and capability plans.
- Create a culture in which engineers combine technical excellence with commercial judgement, customer focus, speed and accountability.
- Act as the senior technical authority for the business and establish clear engineering governance and decision-making frameworks.
Global Reference Design, Innovation & Future Readiness
- Own and continuously evolve the GRD as the global engineering standard underpinning data centre developments.
- Ensure the GRD anticipates evolving customer requirements, market expectations and technology roadmaps, recognising that facilities being designed today must meet customer needs several years into the future.
- Maintain strong awareness of emerging technologies, customer architectures and industry trends, and engage directly with key customers where appropriate to test and validate future design concepts.
- Sponsor technical studies, pilots and proof-of-concepts and incorporate new technologies into the GRD where they provide demonstrable customer or business value.
- Capture lessons learned from projects, operations and customers and systematically incorporate them into future GRD revisions.
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Commercially Driven Engineering & Standardisation
- Ensure engineering decisions optimise overall business value rather than technical performance in isolation, considering time to market, revenue opportunity, CAPEX, scalability, constructability, operational performance and total cost of ownership.
- Champion standardisation and reuse of proven solutions to reduce design effort, accelerate procurement and construction, and enable faster delivery of capacity.
- Establish an engineering culture capable of making pragmatic trade-offs where the commercial benefit of speed and standardisation outweighs incremental technical optimisation.
- Work closely with Procurement and Delivery to maximise the benefits of standard equipment specifications, repeatable solutions and global procurement strategies.
Site Assessment, Project Engineering & GRD Implementation
- Lead the engineering and architectural assessment of prospective development sites, including early-stage test fits, to determine site constructability, achievable capacity and overall development potential.
- Ensure test-fit solutions appropriately consider site-specific physical, technical, planning and regulatory constraints, providing Development and Land Acquisition teams with robust engineering input to support investment and acquisition decisions.
- Ensure the GRD is effectively translated and implemented during the pre-construction and design phases of every development.
- Establish appropriate design reviews, engineering assurance and governance to confirm project compliance with approved global standards.
- Ensure all deviations from the GRD are clearly identified, documented, technically and commercially assessed, and approved by the appropriate authority.
- Balance legitimate project, customer, site and market-specific requirements against the benefits of maintaining global standardisation.
- Provide engineering leadership at key project decision points and ensure technical risks are identified and managed early.
Technical Authority & Delivery Support
- Ensure Global Engineering operates as the company’s centre of technical expertise, providing specialist support to Development, Delivery, Procurement, Commissioning and Operations teams.
- Mobilise the appropriate subject matter experts to resolve complex technical challenges throughout design, procurement, construction and commissioning.
- Act as the senior escalation point for critical engineering issues, technical risks and major deviations.
- Promote cross-project learning and ensure engineering knowledge and best practices are shared across the global portfolio.
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Customer, Commercial & Pre-Sales Engineering
- Lead the engineering support provided to Commercial and Sales teams during customer engagement and qualification.
- Ensure high-quality technical responses to customer RFIs, RFPs, questionnaires and other technical due-diligence requirements.
- Oversee the development of customer-specific technical solutions, including data hall layouts, deployment concepts, drawings and other engineering materials required to demonstrate how customer requirements can be accommodated.
- Ensure commitments made during the commercial process are technically credible, deliverable and appropriately aligned with the GRD.
- Engage directly with strategic customers where senior engineering leadership is required, using customer feedback to inform future engineering standards and product development.
Skills, Knowledge & Experience
- Significant senior engineering leadership experience within hyperscale, colocation, mission-critical or similarly complex infrastructure environments.
- Strong understanding of data centre design, construction, commissioning and operational requirements across multiple engineering disciplines.
- Proven experience developing and implementing engineering standards, reference designs and technical governance across multiple projects and geographies.
- Experience supporting early-stage site assessment, feasibility and development decisions, with an understanding of the relationship between site constraints, design solutions, achievable capacity and commercial outcomes.
- Demonstrated ability to balance technical excellence with commercial outcomes, particularly time to market, CAPEX and customer requirements.
- Experience building, leading and evolving multidisciplinary engineering organisations in a high-growth environment.
- Strong customer orientation and the credibility to engage with senior technical stakeholders at major global customers.
- Strong commercial acumen and ability to translate engineering decisions into business, investment and delivery outcomes.
- Excellent leadership, communication, influencing and decision-making capabilities.
- Ability to operate effectively across Development, Delivery, Commercial, Procurement and Operations functions.
- Willingness and ability to travel internationally on a regular basis.
Leadership Profile
A commercially minded engineering leader who combines deep technical credibility with pragmatism, customer orientation and strong organisational leadership. Able to challenge conventional engineering thinking, make informed trade-offs and create an environment where engineering excellence is measured by the business and customer outcomes it enables, not by technical sophistication alone.
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