Director, Water Strategy

Looking for a new career opportunity?

Our client is the fastest growing AI infrastructure business in the world, and one of the physical constraints on that growth is water. This role exists because that problem needs a single owner, someone who can sit across engineering, construction, and regulatory relationships and make sure water supply never becomes the reason a site slips.

Joining now means shaping a discipline inside the business almost from scratch, at a company whose scale and trajectory are hard to match anywhere else in the market. For the right person, that combination of ownership and momentum is a genuinely rare career accelerant.

What you will own

You will be responsible for water and wastewater strategy across the company’s entire portfolio of data center sites, starting with early site assessment and water rights diligence and carrying through to supply agreements, permitting, and construction.

Before any lease is signed, you will assess whether a site’s water supply and delivery are actually workable, catching constraints early enough that they never threaten the build timeline. You will lead negotiations for water and wastewater agreements with local authorities, utilities, and service providers across US markets, and be the person who keeps those relationships moving.

You will also own compliance across withdrawal limits, discharge permit conditions, and end-user flow agreements, watching the data closely enough to catch problems before they turn into regulatory issues. Throughout, you will be the connective thread between development, engineering, design, construction, and operations, making sure water is never the workstream that holds everything else up.

What we are looking for

• Direct experience owning water and wastewater infrastructure for industrial or data center projects, from site selection through to construction, across several sites running at once
• A track record of negotiating water supply and wastewater agreements with utilities and local authorities, including deals where supply, rights, or access were genuinely complicated
• Ongoing awareness of water policy, rights, and regulatory shifts across active US markets, sharp enough to flag how a rule change will hit a site before anyone else notices
• Hands-on experience with discharge permits, industrial pre-treatment permits, or decentralized wastewater systems in a US regulatory context, navigated without needing outside help
• A track record of coordinating across development, engineering, design, construction, and operations on water issues without anything falling through the cracks
• Writing sharp enough to produce an external water narrative that a customer or regulator can act on, paired with the directness to close a hard negotiation with a water authority

A background in civil or environmental engineering, data center water or cooling systems, water recycling or zero liquid discharge approaches, decentralized wastewater systems, or multi-state permitting would all strengthen an application, though none are essential on their own.

Why this role, specifically

This is a chance to build and define a critical function inside one of the fastest scaling infrastructure businesses anywhere, at a point where the impact of getting it right is immediate and visible. It suits someone who wants ownership from day one, not a seat within an already established team.

Sound interesting? Apply today to find out more.