Design Director

About the role

At PIC, we choose our sites for power and water rather than convenience. That means remote land, thin local infrastructure, and utility scope we have to solve ourselves instead of buying it from someone else. There is no Basis of Design waiting for you and no reference design to inherit. You write both, and they become how this company builds; for this project and every one after it.

You'll own the design function end to end. The standards our projects get built to, the AE and specialty consultants who produce the drawings, and the technical decisions made long before a design contract is ever issued. This includes the phasing and utility calls that cannot be undone once they are in the ground.

You won't draw. You'll decide what gets drawn, judge whether it's right, and stand behind it. If you have ever wanted to see what you would build if nobody handed you the answer, this role was made for you.

What you’ll do

Campus & site planning

• Lead campus master planning from raw land through entitlement: developable area yield, building typology and phasing, setbacks and buffers, laydown and construction sequencing, permanent access, and long-lead utility corridors

• Drive the design side of site selection and diligence; look at power delivery path, water source and discharge, geotechnical conditions, floodplain and wetlands, and fiber routes, then turn those constraints into a development capacity per site you can defend

• Own phasing plans that let Phase 1 energize without boxing in Phases 2 through 5: easements, rights-of-way, and utility sizing calls that nobody gets to undo once they're in the ground

• Set the design position on land use, zoning, and the community-facing issues that come with it: noise, visual impact, traffic, and water draw; back the entitlement effort with technical substantiation.

Solve for remote-site delivery

• Define the design and delivery model for sites with limited local labor, long material lead paths, and minimal municipal service: prefabrication and modularization strategy, skid and module boundaries, transport envelope limits, and what gets built on site versus shipped complete

• Own the design response to remote-site realities including on-site water treatment and storage, wastewater handling, centralized on-site fire water, temporary and permanent power, and workforce logistics where relevant

• Build for repeatability: we need a reference design that survives being dropped onto a different site without a full redesign.

Own standards and design governance

• Write, maintain and enforce the company Basis of Design, design standards, and reference designs across architectural, civil, structural, mechanical, electrical, controls, and security scopes

• Own project requirements and traceability through design, commissioning, and turnover

• Run design review at every milestone including review agendas, comment logs, backcheck discipline, and formal design acceptance; no package is issued without your sign-off.

• Own the design risk register and the technical positions that get escalated to executive and investor audiences

Manage consultants and partners

• Scope, competitively bid, and award AE, civil, geotechnical, environmental, and specialty consultant contracts; write the scopes of work and deliverable matrices yourself rather than accepting boilerplate

• Manage consultant performance against schedule, budget, and quality; run design change control and hold the line on scope creep in both directions

• Work with design-build and GC teams through construction: RFI and submittal disposition, design-related change orders, field-driven design changes, and record document closeout

• Replace underperforming consultants when the evidence supports it, and manage the transition without losing the project schedule

Collaboration

• Partner with development, construction, procurement, operations, and commissioning so design decisions carry operability and total cost of ownership, not just first cost

• Represent design in front of utilities, AHJs, permitting agencies, investors, and prospective customers, including in technical diligence

About you

• 10+ years designing or delivering mission-critical, industrial, or heavy utility infrastructure, with at least 3 of those leading a design function or a multi-discipline design team

• Direct experience managing AE firms from the owner's side; you've written scopes, evaluated proposals, run structured design reviews, and held consultants to their deliverables

• Enough range across disciplines to challenge a mechanical, electrical, or civil engineer on their own work: you don't need to be the deepest expert in the room, but you do need to know when the answer is wrong.

• Working command of the governing codes and standards, this includes: IBC/IFC and NFPA 70, 70E, 72, 75, and 855; ASHRAE thermal and energy standards, Uptime Institute Tier topology, ANSI/TIA-942, and the permitting environments in Texas and beyond

• A bachelor's degree in engineering, architecture, or construction management

Nice-to-haves

• You have owned Greenfield campus-scale from site selection through construction, including the site, civil, and utility scope, not only the building

• PE or RA licensure, or the ability to obtain licensure in target states

• Time at an owner or developer rather than only at an AE firm or contractor

• Experience with projects carrying significant on-site water treatment, wastewater, or on-site generation scope

• A track record of delivering in a startup or first-project environment

• Experience with liquid-cooled and high-density deployments, and what they do to campus utility sizing

Additional requirements

• 40 to 50% travel, front-loaded in the first year.; expect multi-day site visits during site selection, entitlement, design charrettes, major construction milestones, periodic factory witness testing and supplier audits

• Because of our rural location, many trips mean a regional airport plus a two- to four-hour drive, and overnight stays in basic lodging with unreliable connectivity

• Field conditions apply: expect active construction sites, required PPE and site safety training, uneven terrain, and temperature extremes, plus work outside standard hours during energization and commissioning

Process

• Intro call w/Molly Anderson, People Ops

• Interview w/Trevor Fare, Design & Engineering

• Interview w/Adrain Garner, Power & Infrastructure