Title: Director, Design Engineering

Location: Ashburn, Dallas, or Chicago

About the role:

The Director, Design Engineering serves as the senior technical authority responsible for design strategy, execution, and governance for all retrofit, expansion, and customer-driven deployments across the America’s region. This role operates in highly constrained, live data-center environments, where available power, cooling, footprint, and phasing must be translated into maximum deployable IT capacity while protecting uptime, safety, and long-term asset value.

This leader sits at the intersection of Engineering, Operations, Sales Engineering, Construction, and Portfolio Management, ensuring commercial commitments are supported by technically sound, buildable, and operationally viable designs. The role requires strong technical judgment, the ability to make and defend high-impact tradeoffs, and a deep understanding of how to deliver capacity in complex, operating facilities.

What You’ll Do

• Provide strategic leadership, mentorship, and performance management for design managers supporting retrofit, expansion, and colocation programs across the region, balancing resources against commercial and delivery priorities.
• Serve as the senior technical authority for live-site and retrofit design, translating constraints in power, cooling, footprint, phasing, and operations into maximum deployable IT capacity for colocation customers.
• Lead technical coordination across internal teams (Colocation, Portfolio Management, Operations, Construction, and Global Design) and external partners including A/E firms, contractors, utilities, commissioning agents, vendors, and end-user customers.
• Ensure compliance with Global and Regional Design Engineering Guidelines while defining how standards are applied or adapted in constrained existing-facility environments.
• Oversee consultant engagement including RFPs, bid leveling, firm selection, scope demarcation, and design schedules aligned to customer and capital delivery milestones.
• Review and approve key retrofit and colocation design deliverables including Basis of Design, drawings, technical studies, phasing plans, outage strategies, commissioning plans, and OFCI equipment packages.
• Provide technical leadership through construction, energization, and commissioning, including live-site coordination, RFI resolution, outage planning, and Level 4/5 testing support.
• Manage technical inputs to project reporting, budgets, change control, capacity forecasting, and risk management for active retrofit and customer deployment programs.
• Support and lead design gating milestones , ensuring alignment between commercial commitments, capital planning, and buildable technical solutions.
• Drive continuous improvement through lessons learned, standards evolution, repeatable retrofit solutions, and adoption of tools and methods that increase speed, MW yield, and reliability.

What You’ll Need

• 10+ years of mission-critical engineering or delivery experience, with significant exposure to operating data centers environment.
• Strong technical foundation in power, cooling, or integrated MEP systems, including how they perform and degrade.
• Demonstrated experience delivering capacity in live-site environments with complex phasing, outage, and constructability constraints.
• Proven ability to manage consultants, contractors, commissioning agents, utilities, and equipment vendors across fast-paced, multi-project portfolios.
• Experience working directly with Sales Engineering, Operations, and customers to assess feasibility, support commitments, and resolve delivery risk.
• Strong understanding of owner-operator development processes including gating, change control, scope management, and capital delivery.
• Ability to clearly explain, defend, and negotiate complex technical decisions with senior stakeholders and customers.
• Highly organized, process-driven, and comfortable operating in high-pressure, schedule-driven environments.
• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering or Architecture required; professional registration (PE) strongly preferred.

A bit about us

Digital Realty brings companies and data together by delivering the full spectrum of data center, colocation and interconnection solutions. PlatformDIGITAL®, the company’s global data center platform, provides customers with a secure data meeting place and a proven Pervasive Datacenter Architecture (PDx®) solution methodology for powering innovation and efficiently managing Data Gravity challenges. Digital Realty gives its customers access to the connected data communities that matter to them with a global data center footprint of 300+ facilities in 50+ metros across 25+ countries on six continents.

To learn more about Digital Realty, please visit digitalrealty.com or follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

What we can offer you

Our rapidly evolving business sector offers the opportunity to be part of a courageous and passionate team who work together to understand and meet the changing needs of our global customers.

Join us and you’ll be part of a supportive and inclusive environment where you can bring your whole self to work. As part of our team, you’ll get to work with people from different business areas, challenge the way we do things and put your ideas into action. We’ll also give you plenty of development opportunities so you can build a rewarding and successful career with us.

Apply today, take charge of your career and grow your talents with us.

Health and Safety

Safety isn't just a priority here at Digital; it's critical to everything we do. Safeguarding lives, protecting assets, and securing data aren't just ideals - they're essential pillars of our commitment to excellence for our people, our partners and our customers. We have a culture of care where every member of Team Digital embraces a relentless pursuit of working safely across Digital Realty. Together we are Safely Powering Progress.

Our Compensation Philosophy

Digital Realty offers its employees a highly competitive compensation package, excellent benefits, and an environment that recognizes and rewards your contributions. Central to our compensation philosophy is rewarding our employees for achieving the values and objectives aligned to the company's overall goals and values.