Role Overview
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. You will partner across Power Generation Operations, Engineering, Development, Construction, Commissioning, utilities, transmission operators, OEMs, vendors, and site operations teams to maintain readiness, reliability, and accountability across the power infrastructure portfolio.
Key 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.
Ideal Candidate Profile
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 and Competencies
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 Skills / Certifications
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.
Physical Demands / 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.
This role supports mission-critical infrastructure where safety, uptime, procedural accuracy, and operational consistency are essential. Regular attendance, collaboration across time zones, schedule flexibility, and occasional support during readiness milestones, escalations, audits, or urgent operational activities may be required.
Market Alignment
This role profile reflects common marketplace expectations for senior infrastructure engineering roles in hyperscale, cloud infrastructure, data center, and mission-critical environments. Comparable role profiles emphasize operational discipline, cross-functional execution, scalable standards, stakeholder alignment, technical depth, and measurable outcomes that support reliability, customer trust, safety, and portfolio growth.
Why Oracle Cloud Infrastructure?
Global impact at cloud scale where power reliability directly supports mission-critical customer workloads.
Technically rigorous environment where substation operations, utility coordination, safety, and reliability discipline matter every day.
Culture built on ownership, operational excellence, continuous improvement, and disciplined transition from construction to operations.
Long-term career development across power generation, infrastructure engineering, data center operations, and global cloud infrastructure leadership
Minimum Job Qualifications
Education and/or Experience:
10 years of experience in infrastructure design/development, engineering, product development or related field
OR
Bachelor's Degree in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Engineering Technology, Civil Engineering, Systems Engineering, or related field AND 6 years of experience in infrastructure design/development, engineering, product development or related field
OR
Master's Degree in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Engineering Technology, Civil Engineering, Systems Engineering, or related field AND 4 years of experience in infrastructure design/development, engineering, product development or related field
OR
Doctorate in Thermal or Mechanical Engineering, Systems Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related field AND 2 years of experience in infrastructure design/development, engineering, product development or related field.
Job Skills:
Cross-Functional Team Leadership: Demonstrated experience successfully leading cross-functional teams in project or product delivery.
Cross-Functional/Team Collaboration: Demonstrated ability to collaborate across teams and regions to achieve shared business goals.
Technical Leadership: Demonstrated ability to provide technical leadership and mentoring on complex projects.
Data Analysis: Demonstrated ability to analyze and interpret data to produce actionable business insights.
Product Development: Demonstrated experience managing product design, manufacturing, and user feedback from concept to launch.
Mechanical Design: Demonstrated proficiency in designing mechanical components and assemblies considering performance and manufacturability.
Quality Assurance: Demonstrated ability to plan and carry out quality assurance activities for high-standard deliverables.
Thermal Management: Demonstrated ability to design and implement effective thermal management solutions for hardware systems.
Component Selection and Qualification: Demonstrated experience selecting and qualifying components to meet engineering and quality standards.
Power Systems Design: Demonstrated ability to design robust power systems for reliability and efficiency in technology environments.
Electronics Simulation and Modeling: Demonstrated skill in using simulation tools for electronic systems analysis and optimization.
Analog Circuit Design: Demonstrated expertise in designing, simulating, and troubleshooting complex analog circuits and power delivery systems.
Customer Product Alignment: Demonstrated success in aligning product features with customer requirements for maximum value delivery.
Service Delivery Management: Demonstrated ability to coordinate and manage high-quality service delivery and ensure customer satisfaction.
Vendor Management: Demonstrated ability to select, onboard, and manage vendor relationships to ensure optimal performance.
Preferred Job Qualifications
Education and/or Experience:
11 years of experience in infrastructure design/development, engineering, product development, or related field
OR
Bachelor's Degree in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Engineering Technology, Civil Engineering, Systems Engineering, or related field AND 7 years of experience in infrastructure design/development, engineering, product development, or related field
OR
Master's Degree in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Engineering Technology, Civil Engineering, Systems Engineering, or related field AND 5 years of experience in infrastructure design/development, engineering, product development, or related field
OR
Doctorate in Thermal or Mechanical Engineering, Systems Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related field AND 3 years of experience in infrastructure design/development, engineering, product development, or related field.
People Leadership/Management Experience:
4 years of experience in a leadership role with direct reports.
Budget Experience:
2 years of experience working with operating budgets and/or project financials.
Professional Engineer certification