Position Summary
The Business Operations Manager is the financial and operational backbone of the Data Center Engineering vertical. Reporting directly to the VP of DC Engineering, this role owns program-level P&L, drives financial rigor across a multi-site, self-perform delivery model, and serves as the primary business operations interface between engineering leadership, field delivery teams, finance, and the client.
This is a hands-on operator role, not a back-office reporting function. The Business Operations Manager turns field activity into clean financials, protects margin across shifts and sites, and builds the models that let the vertical mobilize new sites quickly and profitably. Just as importantly, this role owns how the vertical runs — designing and documenting the processes, controls, and governance that keep a fast-scaling, multi-site, self-perform operation consistent, auditable, and repeatable as it grows. Success is measured by financial accuracy, margin performance, process discipline, and the speed and confidence with which leadership can make decisions off the numbers and systems this role produces.
Key Responsibilities
Program P&L & Financial Reporting
- Own the program P&L and recurring financial reporting for the vertical, including cost-per-deliverable, burn rate, margin by shift and by site, and budget-to-actual variance.
- Establish and maintain the reporting cadence (weekly/monthly) that gives the VP and leadership a real-time view of financial health across all active sites.
- Identify margin erosion, cost overruns, and productivity gaps early, and flag them with root-cause analysis and recommended corrective action — not just after-the-fact reporting.
- Standardize financial definitions and metrics across sites so performance is comparable market-to-market.
Client-Facing Financial Packages & Contract Management
- Produce clear, professional client-facing financial packages that support invoicing, project reviews, and account management.
- Track and manage change orders, scope additions, and contract modifications end to end — ensuring every out-of-scope activity is captured, documented, priced, and billed.
- Serve as the financial control point that prevents scope creep from going unbilled and protects revenue on every engagement.
- Partner with the VP and account teams to ensure financial packages reinforce customer trust and the value of the self-perform model.
New Site Mobilization Modeling
- Build and maintain financial models for new site mobilizations, covering cost, resource/headcount requirements, and ramp timelines.
- Translate mobilization plans into defensible cost forecasts and margin projections that inform go/no-go and staffing decisions.
- Refine models against actuals over time so mobilization forecasting becomes progressively more accurate and repeatable across the portfolio.
Field Logistics Coordination & Billing Accuracy
- Coordinate closely with field delivery on billing accuracy — reconciling field-reported activity, labor hours, and deliverables against what is invoiced.
- Directly manage the Field Logistics Specialist, who supports billing reconciliation, mobilization modeling, and day-to-day operational data flow.
- Ensure a clean, auditable line from field activity → operational data → financial reporting → client invoice.
Process Optimization, Operational Documentation & Governance
- Own process optimization across the vertical — identify inefficiencies, redundant handoffs, and manual workarounds in financial, billing, and mobilization workflows, and redesign them for speed, accuracy, and scale.
- Build and maintain the operational documentation library: standard operating procedures (SOPs), workflow maps, reporting templates, and mobilization playbooks that let new sites and new hires ramp against a known standard rather than tribal knowledge.
- Establish and enforce governance — clear ownership, approval thresholds, controls, and audit trails for change orders, billing, cost coding, and financial reporting — so the vertical stays compliant and defensible under client and internal scrutiny.
- Drive continuous improvement: measure process performance, capture lessons learned from each site, and fold them back into updated SOPs and models so the operation gets sharper with every mobilization.
- Serve as the single source of truth for "how we do it here," keeping documentation current as the vertical scales and standardizing practices market-to-market.
Business Operations Interface
- Act as the primary business operations interface for the vertical, connecting engineering leadership, field operations, finance, HR/staffing, and clients.
- Drive the operating rhythm of the vertical: reporting deadlines, financial reviews, and cross-functional coordination.
- Support the VP with ad-hoc analysis, executive-ready summaries, and decision support for strategic and operational questions.
Required Qualifications
10+ years in business operations, financial analysis, project controls, FP&A, or program finance — ideally in construction, data center, telecom/network deployment, MSP field services, or a comparable multi-site, project-based delivery environment.
- Demonstrated ownership of a P&L or major program budget, including margin and variance management.
- Advanced Excel / financial modeling skills; able to build mobilization and cost models from scratch and maintain them at scale.
- Experience with change order / contract modification management and client-facing financial reporting.
- Strong command of the operational-to-financial data chain (labor hours, cost coding, billing, invoicing).
- Demonstrated experience optimizing processes and building operational documentation (SOPs, workflows, controls) in a scaling or multi-site environment.
- Excellent communication skills — able to produce executive- and client-ready packages and translate field reality into clean numbers.
Preferred Qualifications
- Direct experience in data center deployment, structured cabling/fiber, or physical-layer construction and Day 2 operations.
- Familiarity with self-perform delivery models and multi-tier technician workforces.
- Experience supporting hyperscaler or enterprise clients with rigorous reporting and compliance expectations.
- Exposure to project controls / ERP systems, billing platforms, or workforce management tooling.
- Familiarity with process-improvement or governance frameworks (e.g., Lean/Six Sigma, internal controls, audit readiness).
- People-management experience.
Core Competencies
- Financial ownership — treats margin and cost as personal accountability, not just a report.
- Operational fluency — understands how field work actually happens and how it maps to dollars.
- Rigor and accuracy — produces numbers leadership and clients can trust without re-checking.
- Proactivity — surfaces risks and opportunities early, with recommendations attached.
- Cross-functional influence — coordinates across engineering, field, finance, and client teams without direct authority over all of them.
- Process & governance mindset — instinctively documents, standardizes, and builds controls; turns one-off solutions into repeatable, auditable systems.
- Clarity under complexity — makes multi-site, multi-shift operations legible in a single view.
Measures of Success (First 6–12 Months)
- Accurate, on-cadence P&L and margin reporting established across all active sites.
- Change orders, scope additions, and contract modifications fully captured and billed — measurable reduction in unbilled scope.
- Repeatable, actuals-validated mobilization model in use for new site launches.
- Clean, auditable field-to-invoice data flow, with the Field Logistics Specialist operating effectively in support.
- Core workflows documented as SOPs with clear ownership and governance, and a measurable improvement in the consistency and audit-readiness of the vertical's operations.
- VP and leadership able to make faster, more confident decisions off the financial and operational picture this role owns.
