Vice President, Data Centre Operations and Development

Role Overview:

Qu Data Centres is a rapidly growing, private-equity-backed digital infrastructure platform operating data centres across Canada. The Vice President, Data Centre Operations and Development will lead national portfolio performance, reliability, customer experience, expansion readiness, capital deployment, and operational excellence as Qu scales colocation, connectivity, AI, and high-density compute capacity.

This is a unique opportunity to join a company at a transformative stage of growth and play a key leadership role in scaling one of Canada's leading digital infrastructure platforms. The successful candidate will bring an ownership mindset, balancing operational performance, customer commitments, profitability, capital efficiency, and long-term growth objectives in a fast-paced, results-oriented environment.

Key Responsibilities:

Strategic Leadership

• Define and execute the operational vision for Qu’s data centre portfolio, including high-density (HD) and low-density (LD) colocation environments.
• Lead initiatives to modernize and scale products and sites, including partnering with engineering and design teams to maximize available sellable capacity and translate priorities into a practical multi-site CAPEX deployment plan.
• Develop and implement a 100-day tactical plan focused on operational readiness, customer experience, strategic expansion, operational controls, and near-term CAPEX execution priorities.
• Build and operate against a robust set of KPIs and metrics.
• Have a deep understanding of overall and site-level economics including costs, profitability, capital deployment, and alignment to business cases and return objectives.
• Develop and execute on a customer physical move plan as required to create more sellable contiguous colocation capacity.
• Ability to build consensus and alignment through clear communications, collaboration, and terminology.

Design and Construction

• Lead design and construction readiness for data centre expansion and retrofit initiatives, including utility power capacity, electrical, mechanical, and architectural design inputs, professional partner engagement, equipment selection and procurement, schedules, budgets, permitting, and independent commissioning.

Operational Excellence

• Oversee facility operations, including uptime, SLAs, capacity utilization, change management, provisioning, maintenance governance, commissioning readiness, operational turnover, vendor management, and critical infrastructure resilience.
• Optimize space, power, and cooling inventory to balance customer commitments, site economics, and future growth capacity.
• Ensure compliance with health and safety, security, and regulatory standards across all sites.
• Maintain accurate documentation, operating data, and single-source-of-truth reporting for stakeholders, including as-builts, SLDs, occupancy, reserved capacity, consumption, BMS, EPMS, DCIM, maintenance records, and sellable-capacity trends.
• Maintain standardized security, compliance, and site-control practices, including access control, visitor and contractor procedures, escorts, shipping and receiving, surveillance, zoning, monitoring, audit readiness, and evidence management.
• Develop, maintain, and test emergency, incident response, and business continuity procedures, including escalation protocols, root cause reviews, and corrective action tracking.
• Lead and measure energy-efficiency initiatives, including power and energy consumption review, mechanical efficiency programs, free cooling, containment, and other PUE-reducing measures.
• Provide operational oversight for telecom infrastructure services, including Meet-Me Rooms, cross-connects, points of entry, and conduit management.

Customer Experience & Commercial Enablement

• Have a deep understanding of customer contracts, obligations, and service commitments, and ensure these remain aligned with site capabilities, operating standards, and delivery feasibility.
• Oversee customer installation, service-change, and de-provisioning processes to ensure reliable, SLA-aligned execution.
• Support larger bids, designs, and proposals by translating space, power, cooling, network, and CAPEX deployment constraints into clear guidance on deliverability, capex, and customer commitment timing.

Team & Organizational Development

• Build and lead a high-performing, efficient 24x7x365 operations team with clear roles, responsibilities, and KPIs.
• Identify leadership gaps and recruit talent to support strategic goals.
• Foster a culture of accountability, transparency, and continuous improvement.
• Build a comprehensive set of standards that the team can align to.

Qualifications & Experience:

• 15+ years in data centre operations, critical facilities, construction, or infrastructure leadership, including multi-site 24x7x365 operations and large technical teams.
• Highly precise, accurate and systematic approach to planning, presenting, and reporting.
• Prior direct exposure to private equity backed businesses and settings an advantage.
• Deep understanding of colocation and high-density compute environments.
• Strong financial acumen with experience in budgeting, forecasting, cost optimization, and multi-site CAPEX deployment planning.
• Experience building and enforcing operating standards, including SOPs, MOPs, EOPs, change control, incident discipline, and maintenance governance.
• Exceptional communication and stakeholder management skills including appropriate use of market terminology, nomenclature and concepts
• Understanding of modern data centre designs, including high-density/DLC solutions, and the related implications for commissioning, maintenance, staffing, and operating procedures.
• Prior experience with large customer and data centre leasing models, including power pass-through and metering.
• Exposure to GPU and high-density compute systems is an asset.
• Strong understanding of network infrastructure, including fibre, copper, conduit, and related physical connectivity requirements.