About the roleAs a DC Site Lead, you will serve as Gimlet's senior on-site leader, accountable for the local team, operational readiness, safe execution, and reliable production. This is a senior people-leadership role with scope typically associated with a senior manager or director of data center operations.
You will own Gimlet's site operations across people, safety, access, equipment health, maintenance coordination, inventory, and incident response. You will understand how power, cooling, networking, and compute depend on one another, identify risks before they affect production, and engage specialists when needed. The colocation provider operates building power and cooling; you will hold the provider accountable for service performance and resolve issues alongside Gimlet's site and central facilities teams.
You will build the team and operating practices needed to bring new capacity into service and keep it dependable. The role requires strong technical judgment, decisive leadership, and accountability through recovery and resolution. You will establish business-hours coverage and an after-hours on-call rotation, coordinated with the provider's 24/7 facilities coverage.
What success looks likeYour priorities will be to:
- Build and lead the site team: hire, coach, and set clear expectations for DC Technicians, the Inventory Person, and the Facilities Person. Establish training, business-hours coverage, on-call responsibilities, and effective vendor relationships.
- Maintain a complete view of site readiness and health across power, cooling, networking, compute, inventory, and physical security, supporting both homogeneous and heterogeneous hardware deployments. Use monitoring, incidents, work orders, and provider reports to identify risks, assign owners, and verify resolution.
- Hold the colocation provider accountable for contracted service levels. Review maintenance evidence, upcoming critical work, and recurring failures with the site Facilities Person; escalate gaps through central facilities and commercial owners.
- Own Gimlet's operational acceptance of new capacity. Set readiness criteria with DC Design, deployment, engineering, and central facilities teams; verify commissioning evidence, documentation, spares, trained responders, and closure of critical deficiencies. Withhold operational acceptance when readiness criteria are unmet and escalate launch risks.
- Establish the site's operating procedures, emergency runbooks, maintenance calendar, and change controls. Govern work priorities and coordinate provider activities affecting Gimlet equipment, with defined approvals, rollback plans, and escalation paths. Rehearse incident scenarios before production and as the site evolves.
- Act as Gimlet's senior on-site decision-maker during incidents. Direct the local response, mobilize engineering and provider specialists, make time-critical decisions within established authority, and maintain clear communication through recovery. Own follow-through on root cause and corrective actions.
- Keep hardware break/fix, spares, asset records, rack documentation, and vendor support organized. Track overdue work, recurring faults, response times, provider performance, and site operating spend against approved budgets.
- Control access and work within Gimlet's site footprint, coordinating building-wide activity with the colocation provider. Enforce contractor and safety requirements, stop unsafe or unapproved work affecting Gimlet operations, and require qualified personnel and approved controls for electrical or mechanical work.
You may be a good fit if- You have owned operations for a data center or comparable mission-critical facility, with direct accountability for reliability, safety, people, and service restoration. You can demonstrate sound judgment in consequential operational decisions.
- You have brought a new facility or major expansion into service and built the team, procedures, vendor relationships, and acceptance standards required to operate it. You have hired and developed technical teams and held service providers accountable.
- You have strong working knowledge across power distribution and redundancy, cooling and liquid-cooling interfaces, networking, server hardware, monitoring, inventory, and physical security. You can challenge technical assumptions, recognize cross-system risks, and determine when specialist intervention is required.
- You have led serious incidents and controlled high-risk maintenance or changes in live environments. You can describe decisions you made, how you coordinated responders, and how you prevented recurrence.
- You establish practical operating discipline in ambiguous environments, communicate risks early, and follow issues through to closure. You are comfortable being Gimlet's most senior representative on site and exercising authority with sound judgment.
- You are comfortable working on site, supporting an on-call rotation, and responding to urgent events outside normal business hours.
Strong candidates may also have- Experience overseeing a colocation provider from the customer side, including service reviews, maintenance audits, and corrective-action follow-up.
- Experience creating and improving operating standards that have been adopted across multiple sites.
- Experience supporting high-density AI or HPC deployments, including direct-to-chip liquid cooling, CDUs, and the boundary between building and IT cooling systems.
- Experience with infrastructure monitoring, ticketing, asset and maintenance systems, and using automation to improve reporting and reduce repetitive site work.
- A record of improving reliability through technician training, emergency drills, preventive maintenance follow-up, and repeatable operating standards.
Agency Policy: Gimlet Labs does not accept unsolicited resumes from recruitment agencies or search firms. Any unsolicited resumes submitted without a signed agreement will be considered the property of Gimlet Labs, and no fees will be paid.
