Senior Director Design Management

Responsibilities

• Strategic Leadership & Cost Optimization
• Define and execute a standardized design management strategy across EMEA, ensuring consistency and efficiency and alignment with organizational goals and business growth.
• Lead cost optimization initiatives, identifying value engineering opportunities and ensuring lifecycle cost efficiency (CAPEX & OPEX reductions).
• Establish structured cost-control mechanisms in collaboration with Engineering and Project Delivery teams.
• Set and enforce design standardization principles, ensuring all projects adhere to an optimized and replicable model.
• Work closely with internal and external stakeholders including clients, contractors, and suppliers, ensuring effective communication and collaboration to balance innovation, functionality, and commercial feasibility.
• Team Leadership & Development
• Lead, mentor, and manage a diverse team of design professionals, fostering a collaborative, high-performance culture that emphasizes innovation, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Identify talent gaps, recruit top-tier design professionals, and implement succession planning strategies.
• Promote a high-performance, cost-conscious design approach, ensuring teams challenge engineering and design decisions to achieve the best value.
• Provide structured training and upskilling to ensure design managers have a strong commercial and engineering mindset.
• Engineering Alignment & Process Improvement
• Drive structured collaboration between Design Management and Engineering to ensure technical and cost decisions are aligned.
• Ensure design teams are embedded early in project planning to optimize feasibility, cost, and execution.
• Oversee the evaluation and approval of consultant and contractor selection, ensuring alignment with cost and quality objectives.
• Implement a Design Management Playbook, defining clear processes, responsibilities, and workflows.
• Project Oversight and Execution
• Monitor and evaluate project performance, including risk management, cost control, and resource allocation, ensuring projects are delivered on time and within budget.
• Monitor and evaluate project performance using KPIs and benchmarks.
• Ensure that design solutions are innovative, cost-effective, sustainable, and meet or exceed client expectations.
• Collaborate with project managers, construction teams, and other stakeholders to resolve complex design challenges and ensure the seamless integration of design through all stages of the project lifecycle.
• Stakeholder & Consultant Management
• Act as the primary liaison between Design, Engineering, and Project Delivery teams, ensuring integration across functions.
• Build and maintain strong relationships with external stakeholders, including architects, engineers, contractors, and clients, ensuring clear communication and successful project delivery.
• Establish clear consultant performance metrics, ensuring that external design partners deliver cost-effective, high-quality solutions.
• Ensure regional engineering and design consultants follow a unified approach, reducing inconsistencies across projects a

Benefits

Additional Information

About Vantage Data Centers Vantage Data Centers powers, cools, protects and connects the technology of the world's well-known hyperscalers, cloud providers and large enterprises. Developing and operating across North America, EMEA and Asia Pacific, Vantage has evolved data center design in innovative ways to deliver dramatic gains in reliability, efficiency and sustainability in flexible environments that can scale as quickly as the market demands. Vantage is seeking a Senior Director of Design Management to drive the strategic direction and leadership of our operations across the EMEA regions. Reporting to the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) with matrixed responsibilities to the Vice President of Construction, you will be responsible for design standardization, cost optimization, and ensuring engineering alignment across our data center development projects. This senior leadership role requires close collaboration with New Site Development, Engineering, Construction, Sales & Solutions Engineering, and Operations to integrate design seamlessly into the project lifecycle. You will be accountable for ensuring designs are cost-effective, optimized for delivery, and aligned with long-term operational objectives. Additionally, you will provide leadership, mentorship, and structured oversight to a multi-disciplinary team, fostering collaboration and innovation while establishing a standardized approach to design execution across regions. Your ability to drive cost efficiencies, enforce design discipline, and enhance consultant management will be crucial to the success of this role. This is an exciting opportunity to shape the future of data center infrastructure, helping to set new benchmarks for cost-efficiency, standardization, and engineering collaboration. Join us as we transform the data center industry with visionary design and execution.

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