Senior Director, Power Systems Engineering – OCI Data Center Infrastructure

Description

The organization will engage at the earliest stages of site development to evaluate power feasibility and risk, establish the technical strategy for delivering power to the site, and work directly with utilities and energy partners to develop solutions that improve capacity, resiliency, flexibility, and speed to market. The team will also own the engineering, modeling, testing, and technical validation necessary to ensure new power solutions perform as intended before they are deployed at scale.

This role will partner closely with OCI’s Energy Contracting, Design Engineering, Capacity Delivery, Construction, Commissioning, and Operations organizations. While commercial organizations retain ownership of energy procurement and commercial agreements, Power Systems Engineering will provide the technical analysis, requirements, system architecture, and engineering judgment necessary to inform those decisions.

The ideal candidate combines deep power systems expertise with demonstrated experience developing innovative utility and behind-the-meter power solutions, building strong engineering teams, and translating complex grid and generation challenges into scalable infrastructure strategies.

Key Responsibilities

Power Systems Engineering Leadership

• Build and lead OCI’s global Power Systems Engineering organization.

• Serve as OCI’s senior technical authority for utility-facing and campus-level power systems.

• Establish OCI’s long-term power systems engineering strategy supporting rapidly growing AI and cloud infrastructure requirements.

• Develop scalable technical solutions spanning utility supply, transmission, substations, energy storage, load management, on-site generation, and grid integration.

• Establish engineering standards, design philosophies, modeling requirements, technical acceptance criteria, and validation methodologies for power systems.

• Build a strong team of power systems engineers capable of solving both immediate deployment challenges and developing long-term fleet solutions.

• Create mechanisms to transition successful site-specific and first-of-a-kind solutions into repeatable global standards.

Utility Interconnection & Grid Engineering

• Lead technical engineering for OCI’s utility interconnections and grid integration globally.

• Engage with utilities, transmission providers, ISOs/RTOs, developers, and engineering partners to evaluate and develop power delivery solutions.

• Define technical requirements for transmission interfaces, substations, interconnection facilities, protection and controls, and campus electrical interfaces.

• Evaluate utility system capability, infrastructure constraints, reliability, power quality, fault duty, and expansion requirements.

• Identify technical alternatives that accelerate energization or unlock additional capacity where traditional utility solutions cannot meet OCI’s requirements.

• Partner with Energy Contracting on utility negotiations by providing technical analysis, engineering alternatives, and infrastructure requirements while maintaining clear separation between technical and commercial ownership.

Early Site Power Engineering

• Lead power-system technical due diligence for prospective OCI locations.

• Assess utility capacity, transmission availability, interconnection complexity, system reliability, power quality, infrastructure expansion requirements, and delivery risk.

• Develop conceptual power architectures and alternatives during site selection and early development.

• Identify technical constraints that could affect capacity, schedule, resiliency, or future campus expansion.

• Develop power strategies that create optionality when utility infrastructure or interconnection schedules present material risk.

• Partner with Real Estate, Site Development, Capacity Planning, and Energy Contracting to incorporate power-system feasibility into site and investment decisions.

BESS & Energy Storage

• Own OCI’s engineering strategy for battery energy storage systems and other energy-storage technologies .

• Develop use cases for BESS spanning resiliency, grid support, load management, transient response, capacity optimization, and utility integration.

• Establish technical requirements and architectures for integrating BESS with utility and campus electrical systems.

• Evaluate system sizing, controls, protection, operating modes, degradation, lifecycle performance, safety, and maintainability.

• Develop modeling and testing methodologies to validate performance under both grid and data center operating conditions.

• Partner with OEMs and technology providers to influence product development based on OCI’s scale and workload characteristics.

Utility Load Management & Grid-Support Solutions

• Partner with utilities to evaluate load curtailment, demand response, ramp-rate management, peak reduction, flexible load, and other grid-support mechanisms .

• Develop architectures that coordinate data center load, BESS, on-site generation, and utility supply.

• Quantify the capacity, reliability, and operational implications of proposed load-management strategies.

• Establish engineering guardrails that allow OCI to participate in utility programs without compromising customer workloads or infrastructure reliability.

• Partner with internal compute and infrastructure teams to understand evolving AI load characteristics and translate them into grid-interface requirements.

On-Site Generation Engineering

• Own the engineering strategy and technical requirements for on-site power generation .

• Evaluate and develop solutions using natural gas generation, fuel cells, microgrids, renewable generation, and emerging generation technologies.

• Lead electrical architecture development including generation configuration, synchronization, protection, controls, grounding, black-start capability, islanding, and utility interaction.

• Evaluate fuel supply, generation reliability, emissions constraints, maintainability, operating modes, and infrastructure redundancy as part of the overall system design.

• Establish standardized architectures where possible while supporting site-specific utility and regulatory requirements.

• Partner with Operations to ensure generation solutions can be safely operated and maintained throughout their lifecycle.

Power System Modeling & Analysis

• Establish advanced modeling capabilities using PSCAD, ETAP, SKM, EMTP , or equivalent engineering platforms.

• Lead load flow, short-circuit, protection coordination, harmonic, transient, dynamic stability, grounding, and arc-flash analysis as appropriate.

• Develop models that capture the increasingly dynamic behavior of AI data center loads and their interaction with the utility grid.

• Evaluate interactions between utility systems, generation, BESS, UPS technologies, and large dynamic compute loads.

• Use modeling to inform architecture decisions, technology selection, operating limits, and risk mitigation.

• Develop repeatable modeling methodologies and technical acceptance criteria across the global fleet.

Testing, Validation & FOAK Engineering

• Own the technical validation strategy for new power-system architectures and technologies.

• Develop First-of-a-Kind (FOAK) qualification plans before technologies are deployed broadly across OCI.

• Establish factory, laboratory, and site testing requirements for BESS, generation, grid-support equipment, protection systems, and emerging technologies.

• Develop test scenarios that validate normal operation, transitions, failure modes, recovery, dynamic response, and interactions between systems.

• Partner with OEMs, laboratories, utilities, Commissioning, and Operations to execute validation programs.

• Ensure engineering decisions are supported by modeling and empirical test evidence rather than vendor specifications alone.

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