Director, Site Selection, Energy & Permitting

AI Infrastructure Platform – Phase 1 Deployment
Location: Europe or GCC
We’re supporting a well-capitalised AI infrastructure platform at the very start of an EMEA roll out.
Phase 1.
Multiple market – focused in France with developments to come in Southern Europe and the Middle East.
Serious scale.
They’ve secured backing.
They’re building the team.
Now they need to add a seasoned real estate professional who can help them to decide where to build next and to help steer the business direction.

The Mandate

Own and build the site-selection and energy strategy.
Not just identifying land.
But securing scalable, power-secure, commercially viable locations that support long-term AI deployment.
This role sits at the intersection of:

• Power markets
• Grid access
• Permitting strategy
• Financial modelling
• Risk evaluation

You’ll report directly to senior leadership and play a defining role in shaping the deployment pipeline.
This is upstream influence at its purest.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Evaluating markets and individual sites based on grid availability, tariff structures, scalability and permitting timelines
• Leading negotiations for land control, interconnection agreements and power supply
• Managing permitting, environmental and grid-connection processes through entitlement
• Building and refining site-scoring tools (cost, timing, ESG, execution risk)
• Working closely with the Design & Technical Lead to ensure engineering assumptions align with site realities
• Presenting investment summaries to ExCo with risk-adjusted financial metrics

This isn’t theoretical strategy.
It’s execution-driven site origination with commercial accountability.

The Profile

We’re looking for someone who understands that in AI infrastructure, power is the product.
Likely background:

• 8-12 years within real estate, energy & power infrastructure or data centre development
• Proven experience navigating grid interconnection and utility negotiations
• Strong exposure to permitting and entitlement processes
• Familiarity across European regulatory environments (strong requirement for French market experience)
• Comfortable managing utilities, regulators, EPCs, consultants and local authorities
• Strong analytical capability with the ability to model risk-adjusted site economics

You need to be commercially sharp, politically aware and technically credible.

Why This Role?

• Focus on creating a new AI deployment strategy
• Direct access to executive decision-making
• Influence over capital allocation and market entry
• Ability to build a scalable, repeatable site-selection engine from scratch

If you’ve built power-secure pipelines before and want to do it on a pan European & Middle Eastern AI platform from day one this is a high-impact move.