Mission critical facilities executive search

Retained search across mission critical facilities, from critical engineering and maintenance through site operations and resilience planning. Vice president to C‑suite.

Key roles we place ↓

Overview

What we do in mission critical facilities

Metric DCX places senior and executive leaders across mission critical facilities, covering critical electrical and mechanical engineering, maintenance and reliability, facility operations and resilience planning. The work covers data centers and the other environments that cannot go down, including trading floors, network operations centers and critical healthcare and laboratory space. Searches are retained and run from vice president through C-suite.

Everything in this discipline is judged on what did not happen. A good year looks like no year at all, which makes these people harder to assess and easier to underpay. We spend most of the reference work on incidents, because how someone behaved in the worst hour of their career tells you more than any project list.

Roles

The roles we place in mission critical facilities

VP Critical Facilities Multi-site critical environment leadership.
Director of Critical Engineering Electrical and mechanical engineering authority across a portfolio.
Head of Maintenance & Reliability Preventive maintenance strategy, asset life and uptime.
Critical Facility Manager Single site accountability for uptime, staff and vendors.
Head of Resilience & Continuity Risk, redundancy and business continuity planning.
Director of Commissioning & Technical Operations Commissioning, change control and methods of procedure from handover into live operation.
Head of EHS Safety leadership in live electrical environments.
Chief Operating Officer Operational leadership across a critical portfolio.
Director of Critical Power Electrical infrastructure and critical power delivery in live and new-build environments.

+ many others

Within this sector

What mission critical facilities covers

Critical Engineering

Electrical, mechanical and controls authority in live environments.

Maintenance & Reliability

Preventive strategy, asset management and uptime.

Resilience & Continuity

Redundancy, risk and continuity planning.

Facility Operations

Site leadership, vendor management and operational discipline.

Market

Hiring in mission critical facilities right now

Demand for critical facility leadership has grown much faster than the number of people qualified to do it. Every new data center needs an operations team before it is handed over, and the training route into this work is long and largely on the job.

A good deal of the available talent comes from the military and from utilities rather than from the industry itself, and the employers who have worked out how to attract and convert that experience are the ones with staffed sites. The ones still advertising for identical experience are usually the ones with vacancies.

Retention has become as much of a problem as recruitment. Critical facility engineers are approached constantly and packages have moved quickly, so a team that was competitive not long ago may not be now. It is worth knowing where you sit before you start hiring rather than after.

Common questions

Mission critical hiring questions

The questions clients ask most often before briefing a mission critical search.

How long does a mission critical leadership search take?

We work to seven days to a shortlist on most briefs. How long the search takes after that depends on the role and on notice periods, so we set out a realistic timeline with you at the start.

Do you work retained or contingent?

Retained. Our mission critical consultants have spent years building relationships in this market, so most shortlists start from people we already know, and talent mapping, backed by our marketing reach, covers the rest of the market so nobody credible gets missed. Retained is what lets us give that kind of time to one brief.

Do you place below vice president?

Yes. Most briefs sit at vice president and above, but we regularly run director and senior manager searches where the role carries a site or a portfolio. A critical facility manager on a flagship site, or a reliability lead across a portfolio would be typical. What matters is whether it is a hire you cannot afford to get wrong.

Will you look outside the data center industry?

Yes, and for this discipline we usually recommend it. Utilities, the military, pharmaceutical manufacturing and semiconductor fabs all produce people who have run live critical environments to a high standard. They need orientation to the sector rather than retraining, and there are far more of them than there are direct sector matches.