Project Development Manager

What you’ll do

As Senior Manager, Project Development , you will drive sites from site selection through shovel-ready. This is not a permitting coordination role. You will be hands-on across entitlements, utilities, and environmental work. Reporting to development leadership, you will work alongside the development team and local jurisdictions to move each site forward as fast as possible.

This role is ideal for someone who thrives under real schedule pressure, likes owning the details, and thinks in terms of parallel workstreams and creative problem solving rather than sequential checklists.

Where you’ll work

If based outside of our Houston, Long Beach or San Francisco hubs, this role will be based remotely from your home office

Responsibilities

Entitlements & Permitting

• Manage zoning, land use approvals, conditional use permits, and variances through local and state agencies

• Build and maintain working relationships with agency staff before they are needed

• Prepare, submit, and track permit applications, and manage responses to agency comments

• Find opportunities to run regulatory pathways in parallel and bring them to leadership

• Flag permit schedule risk early and clearly

• Work with Engineering and Construction to keep sites on the fastest path to shovel-ready

Utility & Infrastructure Coordination

• Manage day-to-day coordination with power providers, water districts, and telecom utilities, and support leadership in negotiations

• Coordinate civil, structural, and electrical engineers to produce complete and accurate permit packages

Environmental & Due Diligence

• Manage Phase I/II environmental assessments, wetlands determinations, and other site constraints

• Coordinate environmental consultants and track agency approvals through to clearance

Stakeholder & Community Engagement

• Prepare materials for public hearings, neighborhood meetings, and agency presentations, and present alongside leadership

• Build community relationships that support current and future projects

Process & Schedule Management

• Build and maintain detailed development schedules tracking every entitlement, utility, and permit milestone

• Track critical path items, escalate risks early, and solve problems before they affect delivery

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Planning, Construction Management, or a related field

• 5+ years working on complex, multi-agency development or infrastructure projects. Experience in energy or data center development is a plus

• Hands-on experience with entitlements, permitting, and/or utility coordination

• Strong technical literacy: comfortable working directly with civil, electrical, and structural engineers

• Strong relationship-building skills with government agencies, utilities, and community stakeholders

• Experience building and managing detailed project schedules and critical path dependencies

• Highly organized, detail-oriented, and comfortable in fast-paced, ambiguous environments with shifting priorities

Bonus Points

• Background in hyperscale data center or other large-scale industrial development

• Experience in oil & gas, LNG, or petrochemical permitting

• Previous experience on the owner’s side of development

• Familiarity with utility interconnection processes

• Experience managing projects in more than one state or jurisdiction