Senior Director - Project Controls

Lambda, The Superintelligence Cloud, is a leader in AI cloud infrastructure serving tens of thousands of customers. Our customers range from AI researchers to enterprises and hyperscalers. Lambda's mission is to make compute as ubiquitous as electricity and give everyone the power of superintelligence. One person, one GPU.

If you'd like to build the world's best AI cloud, join us.

The Senior Director of Project Controls is accountable for global or regional cost, estimating, schedule, risk, and change management across massive capital programs. This leader safeguards margins, validates baselines, and prevents costly delays in mission-critical hyperscale or enterprise data center builds.

We are seeking a strategic and analytical Senior Director of Project Controls of Project Controls to own integrated cost, estimating, scheduling, and risk management across our expanding portfolio. Operating as a trusted advisor to executive leadership, you will lead the Project Controls Center of Excellence, ensuring enterprise governance from early planning through execution and turnover.

Role Overview

• Core Mandate: Establish enterprise-wide governance, reporting rhythms, and performance indicators (KPIs) to ensure data center portfolios are delivered on time and within budget.

• Key Focus: Bridging field execution with executive/portfolio leadership by acting as an early warning system for cost variances and schedule logic issues.

Program Strategy & Governance

• Establish a global or regional Project Controls Center of Excellence, defining uniform methodologies, tools, and data governance.

• Govern cost and estimating management framework, ensuring the establishment of validated Project and Portfolio baselines, cost targets and delivery within budget.

• Govern the change management framework, ensuring all scope variations and change orders trace through comprehensive approval workflows.

• Oversee the development of integrated schedules, baselines, and resource allocation models from concept through commissioning and turnover.

Cost Management & Forecasting

• Lead monthly forecasting, cost modeling, and variance narratives (cost vs. budget).

• Review and approve the development of full life cycle Project estimates and cost targets.

• Review and approve compensation model development and complex construction claims.

• Drive data integrity across the portfolio by linking field progress to financial systems.

Schedule & Risk Management

• Run schedule quality reviews (logic, critical path integrity) and enforce recovery planning.

• Own the RAID (Risks, Assumptions, Issues, Dependencies) log across the portfolio, implementing global standards for mitigation.

Leadership & Stakeholder Management

• Manage and mentor distributed teams of controls professionals, cost managers, and schedulers.

• Collaborate closely with Supply Chain, Engineering, Construction, Finance, and Client/Executive stakeholders to maintain a single source of truth.

Minimum Qualifications & Requirements

• Experience: 10+ years in Program Project Controls / Cost / Commercial Management for large capital mission-critical hyperscale data center programs and/or high tech construction.

• Leadership: 10+ years leading teams, including external partners, contractors, and distributed groups.

• Technical Mastery: Advanced proficiency with enterprise reporting/tools such as Primavera P6, Procore, and Oracle Unifier.

• Domain Knowledge: Deep understanding and subject matter expertise of data center construction economics and cost management including, but not limited to, Earned Value Management (EVM), construction change orders, and schedule quality (CPM/Primavera P6).

• Education: Bachelor's degree

About Lambda

• Founded in 2012, with 500+ employees, and growing fast

• Our investors notably include TWG Global, US Innovative Technology Fund (USIT), Andra Capital, SGW, Andrej Karpathy, ARK Invest, Fincadia Advisors, G Squared, In-Q-Tel (IQT), KHK & Partners, NVIDIA, Pegatron, Supermicro, Wistron, Wiwynn, Gradient Ventures, Mercato Partners, SVB, 1517, and Crescent Cove

• We have research papers accepted at top machine learning and graphics conferences, including NeurIPS, ICCV, SIGGRAPH, and TOG

• Our values are publicly available: https://lambda.ai/careers

• We offer generous cash & equity compensation

• Health, dental, and vision coverage for you and your dependents

• Wellness and commuter stipends for select roles

• 401k Plan with 2% company match (USA employees)

• Flexible paid time off plan that we all actually use

Equal Opportunity Employer

Lambda is an Equal Opportunity employer. Applicants are considered without regard to race, color, religion, creed, national origin, age, sex, gender, marital status, sexual orientation and identity, genetic information, veteran status, citizenship, or any other factors prohibited by local, state, or federal law.