The following roles directly impact your data center’s ability to stay on schedule and avoid months of preventable delays: power systems engineers, grid study specialists, utility coordinators, on-site generation specialists, and BESS integration specialists. Most projects either fill these seats too late or fill them with the wrong candidates. Both outcomes cost time you cannot recover.
The Roles Most Projects Are Missing
Reaching a critical approval point without the right person in the seat is where schedules break. Five functional roles consistently represent the talent gap in data center power delivery.
Role 1: Power Systems Engineers
Power systems engineers design your data center’s electrical distribution system to meet operational, redundancy, and utility submission requirements. They model your facility’s load profile, size equipment to spec, and produce the technical design package that forms the foundation of your interconnection application.
A licensed PE can design electrical systems competently. What they typically cannot do is align that design with a utility’s specific technical submission requirements or anticipate how load profile decisions affect the outcomes of interconnection studies. Errors at the design stage force downstream revisions, and each revision request adds weeks to an already pressured timeline.
When hiring, prioritize candidates with:
- Experience designing electrical systems for high-density compute or mission-critical facilities
- Familiarity with utility technical requirements in your target market
- A track record of designs that have cleared utility review without major revision
Role 2: Grid Study Specialists
Grid study specialists operate at the interface between your project and the utility’s transmission system. Their core function is producing the interconnection study documentation utilities required to evaluate your application: load flow studies, short-circuit analyses, and voltage impact assessments. These are the exact materials that determine how quickly your submission moves through the review process.
Design competence and study documentation are different skills. A power systems engineer models what your facility needs. A grid study specialist models how your facility affects the grid at the point of interconnection. Utilities require the second, and most licensed PEs without specific interconnection study experience cannot produce it to the standard that utilities expect. When you have this person in the seat from the start, your team submits stronger applications, responds to information requests faster, and spends less time in the revision cycle. Most developers do not recognize how wide that gap is until they are already in the queue.
Target professionals with:
- Direct experience producing FERC or state-level interconnection study packages
- Familiarity with the specific utility or regional transmission organization serving your site
- A history of working through multi-stage review processes rather than single-application submissions
Role 3: Utility Coordinators Who Can Navigate Approval Chains
Utility coordinators manage the relationship between your project and the utility’s interconnection and permitting teams. Their job is not paperwork management. It is knowing how approval chains move internally, identifying when an application has stalled versus when it is progressing normally, and maintaining the right level of visibility without creating friction with the utility team.
Project managers are trained to manage internal teams and relationships with contractors. Utility coordination requires something different: existing contacts within the utility’s planning department, fluency in regulatory language, and an understanding of the escalation paths when an application is delayed. Those relationships take years to build and cannot be improvised on a live project. If you assign this responsibility to a generalist coordinator, you will typically learn the difference at the worst possible moment.
Strong candidates bring:
- Established working relationships with the specific utility or regional transmission organization serving your market
- Experience managing interconnection queue positions through multi-year review cycles
- A demonstrated ability to accelerate documentation review without damaging the utility relationship
Role 4: On-Site Generation Specialists
On-site generation specialists design and commission distributed power systems that allow your data center to operate independently of grid delivery. This covers diesel and gas generator integration, microgrid architecture, fuel supply logistics, and the control systems that manage automatic switching between grid and on-site sources during grid events or energization gaps.
Hyperscalers and colocation operators increasingly treat on-site generation as a primary operational layer rather than a backup. The candidate who understands temporary power bridging during construction, generator sizing for high-density AI loads, and long-term fuel management is a different profile from a standard MEP contractor.
The right candidates will have:
- Experience in sizing and commissioning on-site generation for mission-critical or hyperscale facilities
- Familiarity with automatic transfer switch configurations and control integration
- A background managing generator infrastructure through the full project lifecycle, from construction through commercial operations
Role 5: BESS Integration Specialists
Battery energy storage specialists design, size, and integrate battery systems into a data center’s electrical infrastructure. Their work covers storage system architecture, dispatch logic, inverter and controls integration, and the interconnection rules governing how distributed storage connects to the grid. They also navigate the compliance layer: renewable mandates, utility tariff structures, and distributed generation rules that vary significantly by market.
BESS specialists work with inverter-based systems, state-of-charge management, and grid services compliance that generator specialists typically do not. The regulatory environment for battery storage is evolving faster than almost any other part of the power infrastructure space, and candidates without current market experience will struggle to keep their projects compliant.
The strongest candidates bring:
- Hands-on experience commissioning BESS systems at data center scale
- Familiarity with interconnection rules and tariff structures in your target market
- Prior work in utility construction or grid-connected infrastructure
If you are planning for smart grid expansion, this expertise becomes increasingly relevant as distributed generation requirements become standard on new projects. The talent pool here is particularly limited because the role itself is relatively new at scale.
Role 6: Commissioning Engineers
Commissioning engineers own the testing, verification, and sign-off process between construction completion and the transition to live operation. They execute pre-energization checks, verify that electrical systems perform to spec under load, and produce the documentation utilities and authorities require before the facility can operate commercially.
The energization half of the H1 points directly at this function. A data center that clears all grid and permitting hurdles can still lose weeks if commissioning is understaffed or assigned to a generalist who has not worked mission-critical electrical systems before.
Evaluate candidates based on:
- Direct experience commissioning electrical systems for data centers, hyperscale facilities, or other mission-critical infrastructure
- Familiarity with testing protocols specific to high-density compute environments
- A track record of completing commissioning on schedule without triggering utility re-inspection cycles
Role 7: Permitting Managers
Permitting managers own the regulatory approvals that run parallel to — and independent of — grid interconnection. Zoning, environmental reviews, and utility easements each run on their own timelines. A project that clears interconnection can still stall for months waiting on permits that nobody is actively driving.
This is a distinct function from the utility coordinator role. The utility coordinator manages the interconnection relationship. The permitting manager owns the broader approvals landscape across multiple agencies and jurisdictions.
Look for candidates with:
- Experience managing multi-agency permitting for large-scale infrastructure or energy projects
- Familiarity with environmental review processes and local zoning requirements in your target market
- A history of running parallel permit tracks without letting one approval block another
Why These Roles Are So Hard to Fill
These roles are difficult to fill because the qualified candidate pool is small and already deployed across utilities, EPC firms, and hyperscalers. Understanding why starts with the structural pressures driving demand.
The Grid Delays Creating Demand for Specialized Talent
Grid interconnection timelines have expanded dramatically as AI-driven data center construction accelerates. In Northern Virginia, which hosts the largest concentration of data center capacity in the world, utilities are operating with interconnection queues that stretch well past 2030 for new applicants.
Every new interconnection request triggers a mandatory technical review cycle that utilities are no longer resourced to process quickly. The volume drivers include:
- Load flow studies and short-circuit analyses that are required for each application
- Complex power calculations tied to high-density AI server loads
- Cooling infrastructure requirements that add review layers to standard commercial developments have never been triggered
Large power transformers now carry lead times of two to four years from most domestic and international manufacturers. Permitting adds another layer, with each approval type running on its own independent timeline:
- Zoning approvals
- Environmental reviews
- Utility easements
A project that clears one hurdle can stall at the next for months. Equipment scarcity and permitting complexity do not replace the grid delay problem. They stack on top of it.
The Candidate Pool Is Narrow and Already Deployed
Power systems engineers with grid interconnection experience, utility coordinators with established relationships with utilities, and BESS specialists with hyperscale project experience rarely appear on job boards. The people with the right background are working. Most are mid-project at a utility, an EPC firm, or a hyperscaler.
Reaching this candidate population requires access to networks built through nearly three decades of activity in energy and infrastructure, not keyword searches on a hiring platform. Compensation expectations have also shifted sharply with demand. Candidates in these roles now receive competing offers from multiple operators simultaneously, thereby shortening the window between first contact and acceptance. An empty seat in power delivery directly affects your energization date, and settling for a second-choice candidate in a role this specialized carries its own downstream risk.
Read More: Overcoming Talent Shortages in the Utility Sector: The Executive Search Firm Advantage
Commercial Construction Background Alone Is Not Enough
Many of the candidates who surface in standard searches bring strong commercial construction credentials: hospitals, corporate campuses, and manufacturing facilities. That experience has real value on a data center project, but it does not transfer to utility-side coordination or grid study work without specific additional background.
The issue is precision, not general competence. Placing a candidate without utility-specific fluency into a role that requires it creates a gap that rarely closes on the job. When you evaluate candidates for these seats, you need to know:
- What they have built and in what sector context
- Which utilities and regulatory systems they have worked within
- What types of interconnection applications they have shepherded through review
Fill the Seats That Are Stalling Your Project
Power delivery timelines in 2026 are not forgiving. Every week a critical role stays open is a week added to your energization schedule.
Newport Group is an executive search firm that works with data center developers, hyperscalers, and infrastructure operators across the full power delivery hiring cycle. Our power construction recruiting teams draw on deep networks across energy, construction, and infrastructure.
Our SMART Search Process™ (Specify, Market, Assess, Refer, Track) is built to surface candidates with the exact mission-critical experience these roles demand. We do not post and wait. Instead, we:
- Identify candidates who are already working in these roles
- Qualify them against your technical and operational requirements
- Deliver a shortlist of professionals who have done this work before
If your data center project is facing grid delays and you need the right people in the room, contact Newport Group to start the conversation.
If you are a power systems engineer, grid study specialist, utility coordinator, on-site generation specialist, or BESS integration expert looking for your next opportunity in data center infrastructure, Newport Group works with candidates as well. Contact us to explore what is available.