Subregional Data Center Construction Lead - Ashburn, VA

Position Title: Subregional Data Center Construction Lead

Location: Atlanta, GA

Your role As the Subregional Construction Lead, you will oversee all construction activity across the region, ensuring safe, consistent, and high-quality project delivery. Reporting to the Regional Head of Construction, you’ll champion best practices, shape governance, and strengthen alignment between DE&C and internal stakeholders. You will lead multi-country teams, drive operational excellence, and ensure predictable, efficient execution of mission-critical construction programs across the region.

What you’ll do 

• Lead the full lifecycle of regional construction projects, ensuring delivery on time, within budget, to quality standards, and aligned to DE&C governance.

• Drive a strong safety culture, ensuring adherence to all regulatory, H&S, and industry requirements across sites and partners.

• Establish and enforce best practices for project definition, roles & responsibilities, risk management, and standardized documentation.

• Provide leadership, coaching, recruitment, and performance management for regional teams and contingent workforce.

• Build trusted relationships with customers, vendors, general contractors, consultants, and cross-functional partners.

• Oversee resource allocation, project controls, financial tracking, budget management, and cost-optimization efforts.

• Lead governance processes—including progress reporting, gating, H&S reporting, change requests, and escalations—ensuring transparency and predictable outcomes.

• Conduct quality assurance through reviews, inspections, and corrective actions while ensuring adherence to standardized designs.

• Identify and mitigate risks across regional projects and support local teams when challenges arise.

• Negotiate contracts and change orders while influencing vendor performance and driving continuous improvement.

What you’ll need

• 10+ years of progressive experience in construction project management, ideally within data centers or mission-critical environments.

• Demonstrated success delivering projects across markets. 

• Strong project management expertise, including continuous improvement, KPI definition, and performance tracking.

• Experience with technical electrical/mechanical systems and with greenfield, ground-up, and retrofit construction programs.

• Deep familiarity with construction delivery methods, build codes, regulatory frameworks, and H&S requirements.

• Proven ability to manage and develop employees, contractors, subcontractors, and strategic vendor relationships.

• Strong financial acumen, including budget control, cost management, and use of standardized project tracking tools.

• Excellent communication, stakeholder engagement, and influencing skills with cultural sensitivity.

• High digital competence with experience using construction tools, governance systems, and reporting platforms.

• Bachelor’s degree in Construction Management, Engineering, Quantity Surveying, or related field (or equivalent experience); safety or data center certifications are a plus.

A bit about us

Digital Realty brings companies and data together by delivering the full spectrum of data center, colocation and interconnection solutions. PlatformDIGITAL®, the company’s global data center platform, provides customers with a secure data meeting place and a proven Pervasive Datacenter Architecture (PDx®) solution methodology for powering innovation and efficiently managing Data Gravity challenges. Digital Realty gives its customers access to the connected data communities that matter to them with a global data center footprint of 300+ facilities in 50+ metros across 25+ countries on six continents.

To learn more about Digital Realty, please visit digitalrealty.com or follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

What we can offer you

Our rapidly evolving business sector offers the opportunity to be part of a courageous and passionate team who work together to understand and meet the changing needs of our global customers. 

Join us and you’ll be part of a supportive and inclusive environment where you can bring your whole self to work. As part of our team, you’ll get to work with people from different business areas, challenge the way we do things and put your ideas into action. We’ll also give you