Senior Manager - Site Selection & Capacity Program Management

About the role

You will own the identification and qualification of data centre sites across Japan and Australia, building a robust pipeline of Greenfield and Brownfield opportunities. You will manage the end-to-end capacity planning process, ensuring alignment between site readiness and customer commitments with strict timeline adherence. You will perform comprehensive technical due diligence, assessing brownfield conversion feasibility for high-density AI deployments and validating utility-level power availability. You will lead or coordinate site visit validations to confirm ground truth, ensuring due diligence responses are accurate and credible. You will produce structured site assessment reports with clear go/no-go recommendations, risk registers, and cost-to-develop estimates for leadership review. You will engage landowners, developers, industrial estate operators, and municipal governments to source off-market and on-market opportunities while managing local stakeholder relationships. You will ensure sites obtain all required permits, including compliance with Japan's Building Standards Law, zoning classification, power permits, and power purchase agreements.

Key facts

What you'll do

Establish and maintain a qualified pipeline of data centre sites across Japan and Australia, covering both Greenfield and adaptive reuse (Brownfield) locations.

Engage with landowners, developers, industrial estate operators, and municipal governments to uncover off-market and on-market site opportunities in Japan and Australia.

Evaluate sites against Nscale's technical, commercial, and operational requirements, including power capacity, grid connection timeline, seismic risk, cooling options, and fibre connectivity.

Ensure sites secure all necessary permits, addressing Japan's Building Standards Law requirements, zoning classification, power permits, and power purchase agreements.

Collaborate with local government, planning authorities, and community stakeholders to manage permitting timelines and resolve approval bottlenecks.

Build and maintain an up-to-date view of the colocation market, including capacity supply and demand dynamics, new campus announcements, power constraints, and pricing trends.

Track market capacity status across target providers on a regular cadence, monitoring available power, RFS timelines, and pricing movements.

Partner with the Commercial Team to align site capacity and RFS timelines with customer commitments and forecasted demand.

Report pipeline status, risk flags, and site readiness milestones to Senior Leadership on a regular and structured basis.

Perform site and data centre due diligence workstreams, managing third-party relationships across technical, commercial, and regulatory due diligence areas.

Assess brownfield conversion feasibility, evaluating floor load capacity, seismic compliance post-1981 standards, power upgrade pathways, and cooling retrofit options for AI-density deployments.

Issue and manage Due Diligence RFIs to shortlisted providers, covering power infrastructure, cooling capacity, connectivity, security, compliance certifications, and operational readiness.

Lead or coordinate on-site validations to confirm that due diligence responses are accurate, verifying power availability, credibility of RFS dates, and actual capacity headroom.

Produce structured site assessment reports with clear go/no-go recommendations, detailed risk registers, and realistic cost-to-develop estimates.

Validate utility-level power availability and grid connection timelines directly with regional utilities such as Hokkaido Electric, Tohoku Electric, Chubu Electric, and TEPCO.

Requirements

Hold a Bachelor Degree in Engineering, Real Estate, Urban Planning, Construction Management, Business, or a related discipline.

Bring 10+ years of experience in Data Centre development, infrastructure, hyperscale cloud, real estate, telecommunications, utilities, or mission-critical facilities.

Have prior experience in managing site acquisition in Japan and/or Australia, which is preferred for this role.

Possess 5+ years of experience leading site selection, capacity planning, infrastructure strategy, or large-scale capital development programs within the Data Centre space.

Demonstrate experience managing complex cross-functional programs involving Real Estate, Design & Engineering, Construction, Energy, Network, Legal, Finance, and external partners.

Show ability to support executive decision-making through robust business cases, capacity models, and investment recommendations.

Be able to speak and communicate in Japanese, as there is a need to liaise on projects based in Japan.

Have proven experience delivering multiple concurrent high-net worth projects with budgets for large scale data centre initiatives.