Head of Project Engineering

About The Role Volta builds and operates large scale GPU compute infrastructure for frontier AI customers. Every deployment is a project: a site, a customer, a hardware generation, a power and cooling envelope, a network fabric, and a date the cluster has to be producing useful work.

Our project teams own those deployments end to end. Each is roughly five senior engineers spanning data center operations, network engineering, and systems and platform engineering. They join during the discovery phase of a deal, when the technical shape and the commitments are still being formed, and stay with the project until the cluster is handed over to steady state operations.

As Head of Project Engineering you own that function. You lead multiple project teams delivering concurrently across sites, you are accountable for what Volta commits to technically during deal discovery and for whether we then deliver it, and you own the standard by which a cluster is declared done.

This is a leadership role with deep technical substance. You will not be running these deployments from a spreadsheet.

What You Will Be Doing Deal Discovery and Commitments

• Own technical input into deals from the discovery phase: site feasibility, power and cooling envelope, hardware and fabric options, deployment sequencing, and what is realistic on what timeline.
• Pressure test what is being committed before it is signed. You are the person who says a date is not achievable while that is still cheap to hear.
• Contribute the technical basis for cost models, bills of materials, and capacity assumptions, and make the assumptions explicit so they can be revisited when reality moves.
• Support customer technical due diligence and, where relevant, lender or investor technical review.

Project Delivery

• Hold accountability for delivery across a portfolio of concurrent deployments: scope, technical quality, and readiness against the committed date.
• Establish the delivery model each project team follows, from facility handover through rack and stack, power on, fabric build, and burn-in to acceptance.
• Own escalation. When a project is off track, you are the one who diagnoses whether it is a supply problem, a facility problem, a design problem, or a team problem, and who resolves it.
• Allocate people across projects and manage the reality that senior specialists are scarce and demand is lumpy.
• Own risk across the portfolio, including the dependencies that sit outside Volta.

Handover to Steady State Operations

• Define and enforce what "done" means: acceptance criteria, performance validation, documentation, runbook completeness, monitoring coverage, and operational readiness.
• Own the handover to steady state operations as a controlled transition with an agreed definition of complete, not a gradual disengagement.
• Make sure the operational and SLA commitments Volta has made are actually supportable by what the project team leaves behind.
• Close the loop back into engineering: what went wrong, what was manual that should not have been, and what needs to change in the platform or the process before the next site.

Organization and People

• Build and lead the project engineering function: team leads, project engineers, and the senior specialists who make up the teams.
• Hire senior technical people into a role that requires travel, ambiguity, and site presence, and be honest with candidates about what that involves.
• Run the management basics properly: 1:1s, performance conversations, development, and succession for a function where key person risk is real.
• Establish a career path for project engineers so that the role is a destination rather than a rotation people try to leave.

Partners and Vendors

• Own the technical relationship with OEMs and integration partners through delivery, including holding them to their commitments.