Head of Project Engineering

The posting, as Volta wrote it

ABOUT VOLTA

Volta is the category-defining, fully vertically integrated AI infrastructure platform – from capital to clusters to software, under a founder-led enterprise. Our mission is The Utility of Compute™: AI infrastructure as dependable and available as electricity, for every organization that needs it. Launched with a $10B strategic partnership with one of the leading frontier AI labs, a Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, and a $5B AI Infrastructure Fund, Volta is building the infrastructure layer of the AI era from the ground up. We are 100+ people across London, Palo Alto, and New York, with rapid growth expectations to hundreds.

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

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screening, which includes confirmation of your right to work, verification of your employment history and a criminal record check, where this is permitted by local law. Screening is carried out by Zinc, an accredited third-party provider, after an offer is made and all information is handled confidentially and in accordance with applicable data protection law.

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY

Volta is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team and make employment decisions based on skills, qualifications, experience and business needs. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, veteran status or any other legally protected characteristic.

ACCESSIBILITY

Volta is committed to providing an accessible recruitment experience for all candidates. If you require accommodations or adjustments at any stage of the application or interview process, please contact us at askpeople@volta.com. We will work with you to identify reasonable accommodations that enable you to participate fully in the hiring process.

CANDIDATE PRIVACY NOTICE

By applying, you consent to the processing of your personal data for recruitment purposes in accordance with applicable data protection laws, including the UK GDPR, EU GDPR and relevant US state privacy regulations. Your data will be shared only with those involved in the hiring process and will not be used for unrelated purposes. For details, see our Recruitment & Candidate Privacy Notice.

NOTE TO RECRUITMENT AGENCIES

Volta does not accept unsolicited CVs or candidate profiles from recruitment agencies. Any unsolicited submissions, including those sent directly to hiring managers or employees, will be treated as the property of Volta. No agency fees will be payable unless a valid, signed recruitment agreement is in place, and the agency has been specifically engaged for the relevant vacancy.