The posting
Job Title:
Commissioning Director
Reports To:
Senior Director of Commissioning EMEA
Location:
London/UK with extensive travel to EMEA portfolio (Norway, Finland, Portugal etc)
Position Type:
Permanent, full time
Travel:
Estimated c. 60-70% depending on location
About Nscale
Nscale is the GPU cloud engineered for AI. We provide cost-effective, high-performance infrastructure for AI start-ups and large enterprise customers. Nscale enables AI-focused companies to achieve superior results by reducing the complexity of AI development. Our GPU cloud bolsters technical capabilities and directly supports strategic business outcomes, including cost management, rapid innovation, and environmental responsibility.
We thrive on a culture of relentless innovation, ownership, and accountability, where every team member takes pride in their work and drives it with excellence and urgency. As an Nscaler, you’ll build trust through openness and transparency, where everyone is inspired to do their best work. If you join our team, you’ll be contributing to building the technology that powers the future.
About the Role (Job Purpose)
Commissioning is the last gate between capital spent and capacity earning. On contracted AI campuses it is a contractual event with dates, evidence requirements and remedies attached — not an internal quality exercise.
As a Director of Commissioning you own that gate. You will set the single standard by which every megawatt Nscale builds is proven, hold the authority to accept or refuse capacity on the company’s behalf, and build a commissioning and operational readiness function that scales from a 20MW first phase to multi-gigawatt campuses without the standard slipping as volume rises.
This is a build role. The function does not yet exist in its target form — the standard, the tooling, the team and the operating model are all to be created. Our portfolio spans Norway, the UK, Finland and the United States, and the technical scope is harder than conventional colocation: closed-loop direct-to-chip liquid cooling at high rack densities, Arctic and extreme-ambient operation, high-voltage grid interfaces, on-site generation and storage, and heat-reuse obligations.
What You’ll be Doing (Responsibilities)
- Author and own the Group Commissioning Execution Standard — the L0–L6 framework, test scripts, witness and evidence rules, defect taxonomy and turnover package specification — and make sure it is applied, not just published.
- Hold the acceptance gate: no system is energised, accepted or handed over anywhere in the group without your sign-off, and you hold that position under schedule and commercial pressure.
- Select, deploy and govern a single commissioning management platform so evidence, defects and progress are visible in one place across the portfolio.
- Make sure commissioning is built into every project master programme from the outset, and give early, evidence-based warning when energisation or acceptance dates are at risk.
- Work with Procurement, Legal and Delivery so acceptance criteria, witness rights, test obligations and turnover standards are written into EPC and OEM packages before they are let.
- Own the methodology for closed-loop direct-to-chip liquid cooling — CDU factory testing, secondary-loop flushing and passivation, water chemistry, per-rack flow balancing, leak detection, failover under thermal transient.
- Own high-consequence electrical testing: HV energisation sequencing with network operators, protection coordination and primary injection, black-building and utility-failure testing at full simulated load.
- Recruit, develop and retain a scarce, internationally mobile discipline — including in locations where the local specialist market is thin — and build succession so no hall depends on one individual.
- Own operational readiness and the transfer to Operations: complete as-builts and O&M, populated CMMS, spares on site, tested SOPs, EOPs and MOPs, and operations staff assessed as competent before capacity is accepted.
- Set the safe-systems-of-work regime for energisation and testing across every jurisdiction we operate in, and satisfy each local regulatory and inspection regime without running three parallel ways of working.
- Lead the commissioning relationship with tenants and their acceptance teams, and support lenders, insurers and certification bodies where commissioning evidence is a diligence item.
About You (Skills / Qualifications)
- A substantial career in critical facilities engineering — indicatively 15+ years — including 8+ years leading commissioning at programme or portfolio level rather than on a single project.
- Owner-side or client-side accountability for accepting large-scale data centre capacity. Contractor-side commissioning leadership alone will not be enough; this role has to hold a gate against the party delivering the work.
- Personally led integrated systems testing (L5) through to acceptance on at least two hyperscale or AI data centre projects of 50MW or greater.
- Direct experience of high-density liquid-cooled deployments — direct-to-chip, CDUs, secondary loops, water chemistry — or closely adjacent depth and clear evidence of learning an unfamiliar technology quickly and rigorously.
- High-voltage and medium-voltage commissioning experience, including energisation sequencing with network operators and protection coordination.
- Built and led multi-disciplinary technical teams across borders, time zones and languages.
- Contract literacy: EPC contracting forms, acceptance and handover mechanisms, witness rights, warranty provisions and the evidentiary basis of claims.
- Experience across more than one regulatory jurisdiction, and the judgement to build one standard that satisfies several regimes rather than three parallel ones.
- A degree in electrical or mechanical engineering, or equivalent demonstrable expertise.
- Credible at both ends of the organisation — able to hold a technical argument with a lead commissioning engineer on site in the morning and present acceptance risk to the Executive in the afternoon.
- Willing and able to travel internationally at 60–70%, including to remote Arctic sites in winter conditions.
- Right to work in the UK or Norway, or eligibility for sponsorship.
Nice to Have
- Nordic market experience and familiarity with NEK 400, FSE and the DSB regime; Norwegian or another Scandinavian language.
- Tenant acceptance testing with a major hyperscale counterparty.
- Exposure to Uptime Institute certification, lenders’ technical adviser processes or insurer-driven assurance regimes.
- Hands-on use of commissioning management platforms and Primavera P6.
- BESS, on-site generation or heat-reuse offtake commissioning.
- Chartered or professionally registered engineer (CEng, PE or equivalent).
- Experience in a rapidly scaling business, where the standard has to be built while the programme is already running.
Why this role matters
A function to build. The standard, the tooling, the team and the operating model are all yours to create. You will define how Nscale proves every megawatt it builds for the next decade.
Scale and a genuine technical frontier. A multi-gigawatt pipeline across four countries, built around liquid-cooled AI infrastructure at densities that make integrated testing meaningfully harder than conventional data centre work — and more interesting.
What We Can Offer You
You’ll have the opportunity to help shape the operating standards behind a next-generation AI cloud platform, working on complex infrastructure challenges with real ownership and impact. This is a chance to play a meaningful role in scaling high-performance, sustainable data centre operations in a fast-moving environment.
Relocation support is available. Given lead times in this discipline, candidates with extended notice periods will still be considered, though earliest availability is an advantage.
Equal Opportunities Statement
We strongly encourage applications from people of colour, the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities, neurodivergent people, parents, carers, and people from lower socio-economic backgrounds.
If there’s anything we can do to accommodate your specific situation, please let us know.
The responsibilities outlined in this job description are not exhaustive and are intended to provide a general overview of the position. The employee may be required to perform additional duties, tasks, and responsibilities as assigned by management, consistent with the skills and qualifications required for the role.
For information on how Nscale handles candidate personal data, please see our Employee & Candidate Privacy Notice: Here.
Nscale does not accept unsolicited candidate submissions from recruitment agencies.
