Vice-President, Data Centre Operations and Development

Vice-President, Data Centre Operations and Development

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Full-time

Role Overview

Our client is a fast-scaling, private-equity-backed digital infrastructure business that owns and operates data centres in markets across Canada. The Vice-President, Data Centre Operations and Development will take ownership of portfolio-wide performance, uptime, customer satisfaction, growth readiness, capital allocation, and operational discipline as the organization expands its colocation, connectivity, AI, and high-density computing offerings.

This role offers a rare chance to step into a company entering a pivotal growth phase and to help steer the scale-up of one of Canada's premier digital infrastructure platforms. The right candidate will weigh operating results, commitments to customers, margin, disciplined use of capital, and where the business is headed longer term — all within a demanding, outcomes-focused setting.

Key Responsibilities

Strategic Leadership

• Set and drive the operating strategy across the portfolio's data centres, spanning both high-density (HD) and low-density (LD) colocation footprints.
• Guide efforts to upgrade and grow product and site capabilities, working alongside engineering and design partners to unlock more sellable capacity and turn priorities into a workable, multi-site capital deployment roadmap.
• Put together and roll out a first-100-days action plan covering operational readiness, the customer experience, expansion moves, tighter operational controls, and the earliest capital-spend priorities.
• Stand up and manage against a solid framework of KPIs and performance metrics.
• Maintain a thorough grasp of economics at both the portfolio and individual-site level — costs, margins, capital outlay, and how these track against the underlying business cases and return targets.
• Plan and carry out customer relocation efforts where needed to free up larger blocks of contiguous, sellable colocation space.
• Bring people together around a shared plan through clear messaging, cross-team collaboration, and fluency in the relevant industry language.

Design and Construction

• Own design and construction readiness for expansion and retrofit projects — covering utility power capacity, electrical, mechanical, and architectural inputs, coordination with outside professional partners, equipment sourcing and procurement, scheduling, budgeting, permitting, and independent commissioning.

Operational Excellence

• Oversee day-to-day facility operations — uptime, service-level commitments, capacity usage, change management, provisioning, upkeep of maintenance governance, commissioning readiness, handover processes, vendor relationships, and the resilience of critical infrastructure.
• Balance the inventory of space, power, and cooling capacity against customer obligations, site-level economics, and room for future growth.
• Keep every site aligned with applicable health and safety, security, and regulatory requirements.
• Keep documentation, operating data, and reporting accurate and centralized for stakeholders — including as-builts, single-line diagrams, occupancy figures, reserved capacity, consumption data, BMS, EPMS, DCIM, maintenance logs, and trends in sellable capacity.
• Uphold consistent security, compliance, and site-control protocols across access management, visitor and contractor handling, escort procedures, shipping and receiving, surveillance, zoning, monitoring, and audit and evidence readiness.
• Build, maintain, and regularly test procedures for emergencies, incident response, and business continuity, including how escalations are handled, post-incident reviews, and tracking corrective actions.
• Champion and track energy-efficiency programs, from reviewing power and energy usage to mechanical efficiency initiatives, free cooling, containment strategies, and other measures that lower PUE.
• Provide day-to-day oversight of telecom infrastructure services, such as Meet-Me Rooms, cross-connects, points of entry, and conduit routing.

Customer Experience & Commercial Enablement

• Maintain close familiarity with customer contracts, obligations, and service commitments, confirming they stay consistent with what each site can actually deliver operationally.
• Oversee the processes for customer installs, service changes, and de-provisioning so they run reliably and within SLA.
• Help win larger deals by turning constraints around space, power, cooling, network, and capital deployment into clear, practical input on what can be delivered, at what cost, and on what timeline for customer commitments.

Team & Organizational Development

• Assemble and lead a high-performing, efficient operations organization running 24x7x365, with well-defined roles, accountabilities, and performance measures.
• Spot gaps in the leadership bench and bring in the talent needed to meet strategic priorities.
• Cultivate a culture built on accountability, openness, and ongoing improvement.
• Establish a thorough set of standards the wider team can rally around.

Qualifications & Experience

• 15+ years of experience required working in data centre operations, critical facilities, construction, or infrastructure leadership, with a track record spanning multi-site 24x7x365 operations and sizeable technical teams.
• A precise, methodical, and detail-oriented approach to planning, presenting, and reporting.
• Direct experience with private-equity-owned companies is considered an asset.
• Strong working knowledge of colocation and high-density computing environments.
• Solid financial acumen, with hands-on experience in budgeting, forecasting, cost management, and planning capital deployment across multiple sites.
• A history of establishing and enforcing operating standards — SOPs, MOPs, EOPs, change control, incident discipline, and maintenance governance.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder-management ability, including fluency with the terminology and concepts used in this market.
• Familiarity with current data centre design approaches, including high-density and direct-liquid-cooling (DLC) solutions, and what they mean for commissioning, maintenance, staffing, and day-to-day procedures.
• Background with large-scale customer and data centre leasing arrangements, including power pass-through and metering structures.
• Familiarity with GPU and other high-density compute systems is a plus.
• Solid grounding in network infrastructure — fibre, copper, conduit, and the physical connectivity requirements that go with them.